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Goodbye, Plastic Bags. Hello, Despair.
Kroger, the grocery store chain, recently announced that it will phase out plastic shopping bags by 2025. And somewhere in the smoky backrooms of all the other grocery store chains, where the captains of that industry make decisions that control the lives of millions, (“A truckload of Tough Actin’ Tenactin just drove off a cliff in Switzerland. It’s gougin’ time!”) they’re feeling the pressure to follow suit, and the fear of being left behind at the PR docks. That pressure will build and build and they’ll all do it. I find this news depressing and can’t help but feel this is a big step backward for our society.
Perhaps some of you are too young to remember what life was like before plastic shopping bags. Well, let me paint the picture for you. I warn you, it’s dreary.
See, back then there were only paper bags — pathetic, handle-less paper bags. Every trip to the grocery store was a dance with disaster.
Imagine it’s 1981 and you’re getting ready to leave the grocery store. You’re happy because Beavis, the cashier, erroneously typed in the prices of only six items, and you breezed through the checkout in only 18.5 minutes. But your smile fades as you head to the car because you know the battle is really only half over. What are the are the odds you will actually make to your kitchen with your eggs, your glass bottle of ketchup, your little cans of Vienna sausages all intact and undented? Driving home with no air conditioner, condensation building up on that package of frozen peas by the second, and the hard corner of an ice cream carton pressing against the soft paper? Not high, my friend. Not high.
And once you get home, how many trips from the car to the kitchen will you have to make? You can only safely carry two bags at a time. Is Thanksgiving coming? Did you go shopping for all the stuff you need to host that meal? In that case, you’re looking at an hour and a half to get things brought in. Hopefully, you’re among those parents who decided to have a large number of kids just to help bring in the groceries.
And if it is raining? Well, then you might as well forget even getting to the door. You’re going to spend many, many soggy minutes on your hands and knees, getting soaked, picking up your muddy, cracked items, strewn all down the walkway like the wreckage from a derailed train.
Even if you manage to get all these items back into your disintegrating bags, do you have someone to help you open the door when you get to it? No? Well, you are in for yet another treat. You’re going to have to delicately put one of the bags down, letting it slide down your hip, crouching until it lands, then open the door, then somehow pick the bag back up again. At this point, your Doberman leaps at you and knocks a bag out of your hands. In seconds, he has found the ground beef, torn through the butcher paper, and gobbled it up. While you sink down and sob, the dog goes back for the cheddar cheese block. God only knows where your keys are.
Does this sound like any way to live? But that’s the way it was. Crap was on the ground everywhere and life was dark and sad.
And then, sometime in the early- to mid-’80s, like a miracle, like a rainbow, like an April breeze, came the plastic bag. With handles! Impervious to all moisture! Like steel, but light and flexible. And if you double-bagged? Well then, Good Lord, you could carry a bowling ball in one! Your hands were free to open doors, fight off dogs, neighbor kids, or anything else that threatened to grab your hard earned grocery bounty. In no time, refrigerators and lazy-susans were full again. Sidewalks were free of grocery debris. The misery index plummeted. Communism fell. Alf was a hit show. Mothers started nursing their babies again. Everything came together.
And the secondary uses! Well, they proved just as beneficial. Why, how much have I saved on luggage just by using 20 or 30 grocery bags instead? And the change for those who walk dogs? Revolutionary. If you walk a dog, you know what I’m talking about.
But so much for all that happiness. Picture the awful scenes I have described above and behold your future. And for what? Apparently, a few of these bags end up in the ocean. Maybe every now and then fish gets strangled by one. We’re going to give all this progress up for that fish? What, was that fish going to find the cure for cancer? No, It was just going to get eaten by a bigger fish anyway!
Look, I like a clean earth as much as the next guy, but honestly, is Earth really as great as everybody makes it out to be? The excessive gravity here kinda sucks when you think about it. It’s killed millions. And you know about spitting cobras, right? They spit right in your face and then fatally inject you with poison. We shouldn’t have to put up with that.
I’m just saying there could be better planets out there. Maybe even ones with better-tasting vegetables. Cauliflower tastes like flatulence solidified and everybody knows it. (There, I said it.) Zucchini’s terrible, too.
We should see what other planets have to offer. Who knows what might be waiting for us? Beaches with no jellyfish? Chocolate rain? Maybe through some wormhole that might not even be very far away, right? We just need the motivation to get out there and find it.
But I fear that day has been pushed out again. This news is a real setback and our descendants — our hungry, exhausted, dirty-kneed descendants — will surely curse us for it.
Published in Humor
I am too young to remember, but I live near San Francisco, where plastic bags have been the target of regulation for years now.
For the time being, our overlords permit our stores to sell us plastic bags for 10 cents each. Which is annoying, but a small price to pay for such a useful invention.
I do remember, and it was exactly as you describe. I watched my mother, my sainted mother, fill two grocery carts each week to feed her brood of seven. (It cost $40 per shopping trip — such was the horror of those days.)
As the oldest, I carried those bags, that endless stream of bags, from the 1972 Buick Estate wagon to the kitchen of our five bedroom three bath suburban palace, placed them on the kitchen counter, went back for two more, ever resentful that my younger brothers and sisters sprawled idly about the living room, channeling Dali’s Persistence of Memory and playing Pong on our console RCA television.
Those were the days.
I remember gunny sacks. The first swing I had as a kid was a gunny sack filled with other gunny sacks and strung up in tree with only one rope. If the sack was filled and tied correctly, it was a little like riding a pony bareback. If someone pulled on the rope it was a little like being bucked.
Now, git off my grass.
Hard for the young people today to visualize that endless stream of bags filled for $40. I remember in the 70’s we budgeted $50/week for food for our household 2 adults and 3 children.
And not long before that all the bottles and jars were glass. There is so much today’s youth don’t get to experience.
True. I have forgotten how much more glass there used to be. Obviously I exaggerate in the OP, but broken glass really was all over the place back in the day. At least that’s how I remember it, when it was a major nemesis of mine as a kid riding a bike along the road or through parking lots especially.
You can buy 1000 for $15 at Sams Club. A little more at Amazon. Got mine at Sams, just might be a lifetime supply. Of course If you are going to use them for groceries you’ll have to remember to take a few with you. You can fold them up fairly small when they haven’t been used yet. We have found many other uses for them.
1000 for $24.40.
http://a.co/d/b7Z5V4p
Our local QFC went back to paper bags. The new ones are taller, sturdier, and have handles. They also take up way more space, and are useless for mucking out the cat’s litter box.
I have not had a good tasting tomato in many years…decades.
You need to grow your own, or befriend someone who does. Store-bought tomatoes are completely flavorless.
FIFY.
Simply brilliant. I’m shuddering with repugnant anticipation. The part about the frozen condensation on the ice-cream carton turning the bag soggy and then the whole lot disintegrating into a puddle of sticky brown-paper glue in the back of the car has reduced me to tears of reminiscent helplessness and rage. So help me, if I have to go back to those days, I’ll just keep a (plastic) spoon in my purse, and sit in my car and eat the whole container before I drive home.
Brandywine.
I hate plastic bags. Put a jug of milk or a jar of spaghetti sauce in a plastic bag, and it rolls all over the place. (If anyone says I should be making my own sauce instead of buying it at the store, I am willing to debate the point, but only if you personally stomp the grapes for your wine.) You can’t frame up a plastic bag to protect the contents. Sturdy reusable bags FTW, as they used to say, and yes they get grottastic. So hose ’em down.
What I can’t quite do is make the leap from personal preference to social policy. My own animus towards the bags is my opinion, and I have no desire to impose it on other people. I can’t think of anything about which I care less than your preference for a plastic bag.
Come on over. I have great tomatoes in my garden. (In the spring, until it gets hot, so nothing since May.)
Genuinely curious question…..how did people dispose of used cat litter back then? I’m old enough to remember those days, but I didn’t have a cat then! Maybe the advent of highly engineered cat litter (and indoor-only cats) came in conjunction with the handled plastic bags. If I have to start buying them to dispose of my cat’s used litter, I shall be very annoyed.
. . . food, beverage, car, sofa, rug, drug of choice, sexual partner, god to worship or anything else that has no bearing on my life.
Our town in West Texas banned single-use plastic bags, because too many oilfield people were simply emptying them out in the parking lots of the store and leaving them there, to fly free into whatever fence, bush or tree was nearby. Walmart responded by going to thicker, reusable plastic bags, which I like far better than the thin single-use ones (which tend to break through if you overload them at the self-serve checkout), while other stores simply went back to paper.
The Texas Supreme Court ruled the plastic bag bans unconstitutional two months ago, so some stores have gone back to the thin plastic bags, but Walmart for now has kept using the higher-quality reusables, and I’m kind of hoping it stays that way.
When I get ice cream and/or milk, I don’t have them put it in a bag. I just throw it in the cart separate. Of course, I get my ice cream and/or milk in gallon amounts, so perhaps someone who buys them in smaller quantities might wish to use a bag.
Also, I will admit it depends on the items, but I can generally fit more into a paper bag then a plastic bag. They’ll put like two items into each plastic bag, whereas I can get six or maybe even eight items into a paper bag.
Cauliflower’s primary use is as a delivery vehicle for dipping sauces. All those little nooks and crannies allow for maximum collection space.
Correct. Cauliflower was invented to allow me to consume copious amounts of ranch dressing while convincing myself that I’m eating a healthy snack.
But you can make book covers from the paper bags!
Fight back.
That’s extraordinary.
This business of a private company making its own decisions is not good. Ricochet libertarians will just tell you to start your own grocery chain if you don’t like it.
I favor a ban (at local levels, of course) on all reusable shopping bags. People don’t need to buy that much stuff. They can bring reusable cloth bags, like Mrs R does (sometimes) or plastic shopping containers. No, scratch that. They should bring shopping containers made of biodegradable willow wicker.
Don’t you just love it when other people tell you what you need or don’t need? We need more of that.
Also, I hate those plastic shopping bags, and have hated them ever since they came out. Although as I get older it’s hard to be outraged at so much stuff and I’ve mellowed a little. I now refrain from criticizing them whenever they appear in my presence.
As I understand it, they ruled that the bags themselves were refuse, and therefore Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (the state’s version of the EPA) had legal domain over them because it controls what goes into landfills. The cities with all or partial plastic bag bans claimed the bags were containers and not trash in and of themselves, and therefore weren’t subject to TCEQ regulation.
So voiding the bag bans was a matter of voiding local control, though the definition of what a bag itself was (which I don’t think touched on the differentiation between a single-use plastic bag that most stores use, and the thicker reusable ones we’ve got at our local Walmart, which would be more likely to meet the standards of being a container).
I always liked paper bags better than plastic. Can get a lot more in ’em and they stand up better in the car; plastic ones are always rolling around, with cans and stuff rolling all over the back. And paper bags are useful for other things, like wrapping & mailing packages. You can just recycle any extras, just like plastic.
As an aside, I always wonder why I can bag our groceries using about half the number of bags the cashier or bag-person (?) does. They always have 2 or 3 bags with ONE item.
Once they bag it, it’s not their problem anymore. On the other hand, if you put only one item in a bag, it means you’ve got that many more bags to carry/wheel out to the car, and then carry into the house without benefit of a shopping cart. So it’s in your interest to lower the number of trips by getting as many items into each bag as possible.
Wow, Jon – that’s an incredible story. And those things happen every day. In America.
The next time I’m trying to explain to a progressive that government is too big, or too stupid, or too ridiculous, or too out of touch, or too destructive – I intend to recite your explanation to them as close to word to word as I can. That’s a great example. Thanks for taking the time to explain all that.