I need to warn everybody out there that the grocers may have figured out how to get us to use our own shopping bags; it looks like they’re sabotaging the plastic ones at checkout. It’s going to take an entire new mentality for us to prepare for it, and I’m here to share how I’m getting ready for it.
While at the self-checkout today, I noticed the lack of paper bags and resigned myself to using just plastic. This trip turned out to be a six-bagger; used to be four, but the sizes of plastic grocery bags seem to have shrunk lately. What used to hold three cartons of milk now barely fits four frozen meals.
As I lifted a bag with two bottles of juice and a few yogurt cups, it tore and the contents hit the floor. the checkout attendant calmly came over and said, “you have to double bag, because these won’t hold anything.”
So the staff is in on it. That’s an important clue.
She helped me double bag everything, and I noticed the holes at the bottoms of all the bags. That’s another major clue.
So, resigned to never seeing paper-in-plastic again, I took everything home and placed all the defective bags into one big bag to take back to the store next time for recycling.
Since China is apparently averse to receiving our plastic trash now, I’m not really surprised that we’re being slowly steered like cattle toward using our own bags. But we have a problem: nobody is used to taking bags into the store. The shoppers’ mindset is to go in with our wallets full and come out with full bags and empty wallets (or a wad of credit card receipts, or gigabytes of electronic receipt data, whichever you’re into). so how do we enter a store carrying bags and make it look classy?
Maybe the solution is to give shopping bags the same treatment as glass bottles; a deposit gives you bags, and when you return them you get cash back toward your shopping trip. Or maybe we need a classy bag in which to bring our bags into the store. Or maybe we need a bag which fits into our purse and expands on demand when we leave the store.
This is going to take some time to figure out. Meanwhile, the bags we have now are designed to fail us. I don’t know if this is going to kill the supermarket as we know it, but it sure looks like sabotage to me.
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