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I Just Saved the Planet
My daughter asked me to drive her to the supermarket. As we left, I had things stuffed in my pockets and in my hands. Must have looked like a shoplifter even though I paid for everything.
Today is May 4th, the official start of New Jersey’s bag ban. Now that stores are no longer allowed to give or sell plastic and paper bags, I can pretend that I am saving the planet, or whatever made up nonsense is behind the ban. So, look at me! I’m helping.
To my neighbors who voted for our governor, I could say the only thing keeping your face from meeting my fist is Jesus’ call to love your enemies. But I won’t say that. Instead I will just say that if there is still life on Earth 12 years from now, you will have me and my big pockets to thank. You’re welcome.
Published in General
Have Yer Daughter sell ’em outside the store. She’ll make more money than Them Girl Scouts selling cookies.
They can’t sell paper bags? How did that get through? Don’t the stores realize that influences purchasing down?
Next time in Jersey I have to remember to bring a couple of bags for stocking up on Taylor ham.
Oh no you don’t. Do NOT ignite the Taylor ham vs pork roll war!!!!
My Jersey girl has already made the call. I’m just a supportive hubby.
Big government regulators forced the name change. Even 100 years ago, the government was too big for its own good.
And it is Taylor Ham and a proper Taylor Ham, egg, and cheese sandwich is served on a hard roll (not a bagel) with salt, pepper, and ketchup. But can the deli still give you a paper bag?
My malicious side would be tempted to bring into the supermarket the biggest bin that would fit in my car to cause the most disruption possible at the checkout station.
Customers are responsible for bagging at our local Aldi supermarket. The market sells bags, but does not hand out bags for free. But, at a couple of locations in the store they have stacks of the boxes that some of the merchandise had come in so that customers can use those to take their purchases to the car and then home.
Around here, reusable bags were banned because they had covid cooties. You had to use paper or plastic. Besides, no one ever cleans a reusable bag. I can only imagine what creepy crawlies lurk therein.
As for Taylor Ham, No Ketchup.
I’m still looking for a recipe to make a good homemade hard roll.
And if there is a grocery or deli near you that sells Boar’s Head, ask them to get you Taylor Ham…same distributor (at least around here).
And I thought Washington’s plastic bag ban was far out! At least the store can sell you either a paper bag or a reusable compostable plastic bag, but they are required to sell them to you. And I can never find anyone who can tell me where that money goes-to the government? To the store? No one seems to know. And they did NOT ban the plastic produce bags, or plastic bags in the meat department for your steaks. Stupid, and just plain evil.
Yeah, I think this ban was supposed to into effect a couple years ago but because of COVID they went from “bring your own bag” to “you can’t bring your own bag.” The governor had to decide which emergency was most worthy of an ineffective mandate.
Ketchup is optional.
The standard NJ breakfast has always been coffee with a buttered hard roll. Wasn’t until I moved to other states that I realized how unique hard rolls are. Other places have round rolls that look the same, but they are not. Don’t know what the secret is.
You can buy a reusable bag, but not a paper one. They still have the little plastic bags for produce and meat.
But they did something and that’s all that matters.
So many times I hear people saying, “Well we have to do something.” No, no you don’t.
Aha … big government… That explains why all right thinking people call it Taylor Ham.
Last night I opened the pantry door and what happened is what often happens: the pile of plastic bags stuffed in there started spilling out. I thought to myself “This bag nonsense did what, exactly?!”
At least your state is honest about it, with an outright ban. Our state simply defined “single use plastic bag” by the thickness of the plastic, so now the stores use thicker plastic and they are ok.
There is probably a viral video opportunity here for someone to buy a large load of groceries and make the cashier and next in line wait while they carry the stuff out to the parking lot an armload at a time. No law that says you have to use a bag, right?
My solution.
Just like the Joe Biden “I did that” stickers on gas pumps, I’m tempted to stick on the reusable bag display: “You realize that people store these behind the cat litter box.”
You said look at me, so I was looking for a picture of you with eight cloth bags hanging from your wrists……. wow! That is a bit extreme – you can recycle both – why don’t they opt for that? My pockets won’t hold that much!
There are a lot of planets. Please be more specific. Which one did you save?
Whichever one was is danger of being destroyed by shopping bags
I would’ve settled for Pluto.
Same in Albuquerque. A plastic bag ban went into effect early 2020 in the city. Then shortly into the “15 days”, cloth reusable bags were determined to have covid cooties and those were banned. For a while these thicker ones, “California approved”, showed up in the stores. Eventually, the plastic bag ban was waived, for the greater good I guess.
Last August, the mayor said that even though the “Deadliest Plague Ever” was still around the environment was more important and ended the waiver. The California bags haven’t returned. They were quite thick. However, my grocery store has plastic bags with a thickness between the pictured bag and the old flimsy ones. The environmentalists in town are upset that the statute wasn’t written correctly because it allows thicker bags, which is making things worse than when we had flimsy bags.
“Don’t just do something, stand there.”
Some thoughts on bagging…………
I have been using reusable heavy-duty canvas bags to put my groceries in for nearly twenty-five years. My wife does mostly the same. We are not trying to “save the planet.” I don’t know about hers, by my reason is simply that I don’t like carrying 40 bags with one or two items each, back and forth to my car and then into my house. I am strong, hale and hearty, and I can carry a few heavy bags no problem. I tell the store packers (if I’m not packing my own) to fill the bags as heavy as they can pack them because I am not an old lady. I prefer to consolidate all items into as few bags as possible for ease of carrying.
I first got the idea from one of my best customers in the 1990’s, corporate financier Michael Milken. He used to go to meetings not with briefcases, but with several big heavy-duty open canvas bags packed with his papers and such. His were custom-made with the Milken Institute name and logo printed on them. When I first met him, he gave me one to carry some of my camera equipment that I had clumsily toted in without containers. It worked so well that I thought, “Hey, these would be great for carrying groceries!” That was in the mid 1990’s before they started selling reusable bags in grocery stores.
So I used the bag on my next grocery run and was so pleased that I found some similar ones to use as well. About a dozen years later, much to my annoyance, I lost the original Milken Institute bag by inadvertently leaving it in a grocery cart, but I’ve been using other bags since. One of my biggest pet peeves during the Covid panic was that stores would often not allow reusable bags for fear of them transmitting Covid germs. I used to argue with the clerks “If these bags are so contagious, wouldn’t people’s clothing and women’s purses be even more so, seeing that they are in constant contact with their bodies?” And ironically these stores would have reusable bags for sale in plain sight – but they wouldn’t let you bring them into the store!
We live in what you might describe as “inner city” Cleveland. There is a discount grocery store around the corner from us where I frequently shop. Fully half of the customers there get all their food for free using government food stamps. The store does not give out free bags, but charges 25 cents for bags and boxes, even to the food stamp customers. In the 14 years that I have been shopping there, I have seen only two people besides me, carry in their own bags. Those supposedly “poor” people don’t even bother keeping the plastic bags they already paid for and reusing them again. And so it goes……………