Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
It’s an interesting situation, because you have a case where store owners were mad over government dictating what type of bags they could and couldn’t use, and went to court, where the state overruled the local governments and told them what they could and couldn’t define as trash versus containers (and based on the Supreme Court ruling, I suppose in the future if Texas were to turn Blue, the TECQ could then simply ban plastic bags statewide by department ruling, to save the environment, based on its domain over landfill control, and cities would have no recourse but to go along).
What will people pick up there dog doo with? In San Francisco what will they pick up the people doo with?
I remember back before plastic bags. They had a bag boy who would push your cart to your car and load them into it, and didn’t expect a tip.
That’s my pet peeve. If the grocery stores want to reduce plastic bag usage without unduly inconveniencing customers, they could just train their employees to bag more efficiently. It bugs me because I’m the one who has to get rid of all these plastic bags that accumulate in my house. (I use my own reusable bags at the grocery store, but I don’t always have them with me when I make a stop at Walmart on the way home from work.)
I have been known to rebag my own items before leaving the store. It’s not unusual for me to reduce the number of bags used by half.
You must not be growing them yourself. The commercially produced ones are harvested green and ‘ripened’ using some gas on the way to the store, most of them anyway. That’s guaranteed to ruin a good thing. Mrs. OS has discovered some that are attached to some portion of the vine and they are better but nothing beats the ones she picks fresh from our own vines. Same with most vegetables we grow ourselves.
Triple like with quadruple chocolate syrup on top.
Kroger should say to these busybodies MYOB.
This is the kind of local response to a local problem (constant wind coupled with bad behavior) that makes sense when implemented freely by choice for a given location. It’s the imposition of local solutions in areas that don’t even experience the problem that bother me the most. I noticed the bags on fences when driving through that area a few years back, glad to know you all have come so such a sensible solution, that the Texas Supreme Court made a reasonable ruling and that local stores have responded in sensible ways.
I was that bag boy in 1966, senior year in HS. And I remember being trained as to how to fill a paper grocery bag, square the bottom layer with solid and heavier items, bread on top, eggs near but not on top, cold items together. etc. Double bagging (insert bag and open it inside another) if it was going to be heavier than regular bagging. And yes we took them to the car, fairly often the customer would jokingly ask if we could follow them home to bring them in and put them away. And a very few very kindly old ladies (probably at least 50!!) would give a lucky bag boy a quarter. Those were the days :)) I still prefer to do my own bagging as no one today seems to have any idea how to do the job properly.
The biggest problem with the single-use plastic bags was that they were designed and made so cheaply that they were like balloons. These balloons sailed everywhere. :-) I’ve seen them in tree tops and overhead wires. I’m sure the cities and towns have become quite annoyed with them. It was a flawed design to begin with.
Banning plastic bags has been embraced by grocery stores where required by law, because now they don’t spend money on bags and they get people to pay a few bucks for every reusable bag they need and usually forget to reuse. Almost every purchase results in another $2 profit. Win for the stores.
Kroegers probably won’t go back to paper bags. They’ll likely go to no bags and sell you bags if you want them.
As for me, I’ve stopped using bags entirely. I load everything back into the cart and then load it all into the car. When I get home, it’s not that difficult to make a few trips from the garage to the car and everything goes to its proper place in the fridge or pantry without the additional step of getting unbagged. In manufacturing they call that “fewer touches” and it’s a good thing.
And I’ll be damned if I’ll pay the store for an overpriced “reusable” bag.
My wife, on the other hand . . . .
I have the solution. I will buy more stuff on-line. That eliminates plastic bags. Of course it adds bubble wrap, boxes, tape, fuel to transport, etc., but the environment will be better because no plastic bags.
So much in life boils down to the question “What problem needs to be solved?” So the plastic bags solved the problem of the tree-paper problem of thirty years ago. But also, bags in grocery and department stores in general solved the problem of petty shoplifting. There are so few salespeople on the “floor” anymore, which the stores can afford to do because people’s purchases are put in bags. The physical presence of store personnel was a deterrent in itself. That became expensive. So the stores went to cameras that were monitored by a single person in a room. A person walking around with a new store item out of the bag would be spotted on camera. I’m sure the big expensive items will have some type of theft-protection built into them at the manufacturer point. But I’m wondering if the small-item stores will start to see an uptick in petty shoplifting. The lack of bags will create a visual confusion for the security people monitoring the store by camera.
One could argue all designs are flawed. There is no perfect product. Your argument has more to do with flawed trashy people, than the bag design.
I would argue the design is not flawed, otherwise hundreds of millions wouldn’t have been sold.
“Flaw” in the sense that it created an unintended consequence for the stores that used them.
For sure people need to be careful with them.
On the other hand, when things become a problem, often a better design is the solution.
Disney World does not have a litter problem. But that’s because they’ve looked at the problem intelligently. A guest buys an ice cream cone with a paper wrapper and just as the person is finished with the ice cream cone, well, what do you know, there’s the trash can. :-)
Everything in life gets down to design eventually. :-)
Looking at the constant stream of corrugated cardboard being brought to our local dump, I’m guessing Amazon is going to be pressured to come up with different ways of packaging things.
Because you’re right. I love getting stuff online, but I’m sure someone out there is looking at the packaging required and complaining.
We have a real conflict developing in this country, just as it has developed in other places.
We are a consumer-based economy. The companies are trying to sell their goods. They want to make sales as easy as possible.
But on the other side, we are drowning in petty bureaucrats who have never tried to sell a product in their life. All they see is more work for them.
We need executive leadership in government–leaders who are sympathetic to the business world and their needs. Otherwise, our economy will fall apart, brought to its knees by the people who run the town dump.
McDonald’s had a big PR problem with cities and towns, by the way. McDonald’s has worked hard to build in systems to capture their single-use serving containers somehow so they don’t end up as bad PR littering the streets of the towns in which they operate.
We just need better executive leadership all around. At the moment, everything we do seems to be at cross-purposes to something else we need to do.
Soon someone will be shoving a plastic bag up a turtle’s nose and then filming themselves pulling it back out. Nah, plastic bags are already villified. Straws and spoons have been done. Who knows what they’ll shove up a turtle’s nose next.
I did the job in the 80s during the paper era. Your training was just like mine. I learned to be careful with the cereal boxes in the corner of the bag cuz the corner might punch through the bag if you bunched the top of the bag to lift it. I helped the customers out to the car and loaded it. Paper bags stand up better in trunks. Plastic bags roll around.
You should move to California then. Since they passed the law that requires stores to charge 10 cents per bag, the cashiers now ask “do you want bags today?” and if you say yes, they carefully pack each bag to the brim since presumably customers will be angry if we are charged for more bags than the bare minimum.
Which is essentially a tax increase on groceries. I suspect for a while the tax revenue was earmarked for environmental programs to offset the effects of …. umm … plastic bags, but over time, money being fungible they trade it away toward other spending priorities that benefit officeholders. For example low show jobs for “stakeholders” at the San Fran recycling plant.
Paper bags are also good for putting kindling in
I actually think that’s the best approach. Not as a government mandate, though. Right now, stores have to factor the cost of bags into their prices. Instead, I’d prefer that they charge for bags explicitly. Ten cents is probably too high, but even a nominal cost of a few cents (whatever the bags actually cost) would work. Let the normal laws of supply and demand work.
Some discount stores (like ALDI) do this already. It makes sense to me. When you hide the price of something and make it appear to be free, people are going to waste it.
You’re kind of hurting your own argument there.
See above:
That’s 1.5 cents each, and that’s retail price. Presumably the stores buy them in bulk at greater discounts, so even a nominal charge of 1 cent per bag is probably more than they cost.
Except I don’t think the state actually collects the revenue, my understanding is the stores get to keep it. It’s more like price controls; it’s a law that says “you cannot give bags away for free, you must sell them at a minimum price of $0.10.”
That’s the point at which I decided this must be a comedic piece . Surely .Right?
Paper is clearly Superior to plastic for groceries, not that I’m biased or anything
Oh no, that was my only objection to his post. Plastic is much better than paper (and I’m old enough to remember paper). I can carry an entire cart of groceries from my car to my house in one trip with plastic. That alone makes it a winner over paper, and when you add in how frequently paper bags would tear if the groceries weren’t properly bagged, it’s only more clear that plastic is superior.
Our local Kroger’s outlet (Fred Meyer) has already stopped using plastic bags due to a recently enacted municipal ordinance. I think it’s a PITA.
We don’t usually use plastic bags, my wife caries a couple of these in her purse:http://Easy Fold Bag – Reusable Grocery Bags – 3 Pack, Cobalt Bl
We use the plastic bags we bought for cat litter and to give out in our store. Occasionally we do get plastic bags. To prevent them from rolling around in the trunk we hang them up on the cargo net hooks (and the reusable ones) in the trunk. Or put up the cargo net. If you don’t have a net, get a folding a trunk organizer the’ll keep everything together.
We are only .4 of a mile from our Costco so its no problem to toss everything in the trunk then back the car into the garage, the pantry is just a few steps then.
You can? The plastic bags at your store must be superior to the ones at mine, because I’m always worried the one’s I get are going to break. Although we can also still get paper bags.