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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
When I go to ALDI I bring a couple totes and maybe a cooler to load up everything I get. I don’t mind plastic bags, because they’ve got some reusability, but they give me more than I need, and I’d like to get paper bags sometimes for other uses.
My Dad worked at a paper mill for a zillion years so while I was growing up we always asked for paper at the grocery store. We would then use the bags for the kitchen garbage. Some of the stores stopped offering paper bags so then we discovered the amazing value of the thin tough plastic. We also switched over to using actual garbage bags for the kitchen garbage due to not bringing home enough paper bags and suddenly we didn’t have to clean up the nasty mess a damp paper bag creates when it inevitably gives out. We also could leave the garbage for a whole day instead of talking it out 2 or 3 times!
My mother-in-law uses paper bags as her kitchen garbage. Occasionally I will get paper when I shop at Yokes and take it to her. It’s a good reminder of why I use plastic.
Is there a #nevergoingback?
The only time I can recall having one break was when I had multiple 2-liter soda bottles in one and didn’t double bag it. And it wasn’t a catastrophic failure, I was able to get them down to the ground before the bag fully ripped. Unlike with paper bags where I can think of many times I picked up a bag by the sides so I could get my hands under it, then having the bottom of the bag rip out before I could get it.
My dad also worked his entire career at a paper mill. I worked ten years at one for the start of my career. I like paper products, but not for groceries.
Mrs. Tabby (who does the grocery shopping) likes using the store’s reusable bags because they hold much more than the baggers are willing to put in plastic bags. But as you noted, there are many secondary uses for plastic grocery bags:
Kitchen garbage
Dog poo
Briefcase (yes, a friend carries his papers for church meetings in a plastic grocery bag)
Shoe carrier in bad weather (when wearing boots through the snow, carrying shoes to wear at destination)
Carrying various stuff (cleaning supplies, small auto parts, etc.)
The best use for paper bags is if you cut them open and cool fresh-baked cookies on them. That’s what we did growing up. And my mom saved every bag – so we had to make lots of cookies!
The thin plastic bags were good for trash can liners. Also, our local thrift store takes donations to use when bagging purchases. They are not good, at least in our desert climate, for storing things in the garage. After a summer or two of desert heat, they disintegrate into dust. I’ve never understood this “they last for 1000 years” hysteria.
Most people here in my corner of California, where thin plastic bags were outlawed at most grocery/Walmart-type places a few years ago, have gotten into the habit of having a bag of bags in their trunk. The trick is to remember to take a bunch of bags with you into the store when you go in. Remembering your trunk full of bags when you get to the checkout isn’t going to cut it.
You don’t already keep an ice cream spoon in your purse? What nonsense kind of life do you live, anyway, @She?
LoLz.
Those grocery bags notoriously have holes. I will not use them for cat litter, lest they leak.
And when the plastic grocery bags become illegal or unavailable, guess what? People will BUY plastic bags for all their assorted refuse needs.
My goodness, the SJ & Eco Justice Warriors are intolerably stoopid.
Books are so passe.
The other 9 cents is a penalty. Or wait, maybe it is a tax?
Oh, oh, oh, and draining bacon. 😁
At which point, they will outlaw plastic bags altogether, just like the incandescent light bulb.
Oh, yes, very tongue in cheek here. But I really do lament the demise of plastic bags. I guess when the time comes, I’ll just have to buy them.
Although I take back nothing I said about cauliflower, I admit there are moments when I do enjoy the Earth. I spend most of my time a healthy distance from volcanoes, and generally things seem to go ok. And after all, nothing is truly artificial, when you think about it, not even the delicious Twinkie I just ate. The Earth gets some credit for that. I get that my ‘07 Honda Accord wasn’t mined out of a mountain like a granite slab, but we didn’t just conjure it up out of the supernatural realms, either. It all comes from natural material at some point. At what point can you call something artificial? Topic for another post.
With wild abandon and a snicker at the eco-warriors, I use TWO thin plastic bags to dispose of used cat litter if the first one I pick up has a hole in it.
Heresy!! If you drain onto paper, you can’t collect it to use in later cooking! What a waste of good bacon grease.
How do you expect executive leadership to solve this, or any other problem? Are you implying we need a dictator to tell us what we can and cannot do? I am not trying to be sarcastic. I don’t understand what you are implying.
This legal ruling is a window into our future, a future I shutter to think about.
I hoarded incandescents a few years ago. Gonna leave them to our kids in the will.
I understood @MarciN just fine. We need to elect better and smarter people. Not to dictate to us, but to propose solutions that help solve problems and explain them to us so we can approve them.
You are okay in doing this. The Obama Administration made it clear, back in 2014 when it outlawed 100 watt bulbs, that we could all use up whatever bulbs we had already purchased. Or do whatever we wanted to do with them. (I only found out about this 100 watt ban recently. For years, I simply thought our rural hardware stores sold out of them quickly.)
On second thought, since I don’t keep up with much these days, it is possible tht a SWAT team will descend on you and yours. “Come up with your hands up! We know you have incandescent bulbs in the living room!”
I just hope you aren’t drinking something while using a plastic straw when they arrive.
back to my point about the deplorable lack of proper training for bag boys today (can I still say ‘bag boys’? At least on Ricochet?) A properly loaded paper bag will not tear unless the customer tries to pick it up with one hand grasping only one side of the top causing the weight to put undue stress on the bit of paper being misused. That’s just my biased opinion, of course. Now, if you like plastic better than paper, I say, more power to you. My actual preference was for the all too small time period when stores had both and asked, “Paper or plastic?” before improperly loading items into whatever the customer had chosen to wrestle home. I suppose it got to be just too frustrating waiting for some people (you know who you are) to finally make a decision about such an earth shattering matter.
Is there an app for that??
Obviously a primary requirement on the application form. Intelligent people not needed nor welcome ;>)
when plastic is outlawed only outlaws will have plastic
That makes me wonder … could plastic bags be recycled into 3D-printed guns?
I take it back then, this is even worse than I thought. Rather than a high minded transfer from shoppers to mitigate the environmental effects of plastic bags, it is a forcible transfer from shoppers to the grocers themselves.
Not enough money to change behavior of course, but the grocers love it.
What problem was solved by replacing a largely recyclable product (paper made from Kraft pulp) which itself was made from a mix of recycled and virgin pulp, the latter made from a renewable resource (trees), with an unrecyclable, only marginally reusable petroleum product (aka plastic)?
Annoying to read through three pages of comments before I can honorably respond to something about which I actually have knowledge, but I do it for the team. Many good words have thus been spilled upon the relative merits of the materials in question, but until you’ve been to a few of the facilities to which the “blue box” (aka recyclable) waste stream goes, you will not know how evil are plastic bags. They’re everywhere. They clog ventilation systems, conveyor links and sprockets, hammer mills, belt drives, and everything else that’s supposed to move. One facility that I surveyed had 12 people on the line, and eight of then, in lines of four on each side of a wide spot in the process conveyor, did nothing but try to pull the plastic bags out of the stream. With limited success.
The plastic bag was a non-solution to a non-problem.
I wouldn’t count on that. Grocers didn’t love deposit laws even though they reaped a small gain from cans and bottles that never came back to the store. It didn’t pay for the mess and bother. This isn’t exactly the same thing, in that customers don’t exactly get ten cents back for each bag they bring back to be re-used, but there are some similarities.
Why is that any of my concern?
Waste disposal is a service. I as a customer pay for that service, either directly or through taxes. After that, what happens to the bags is not my problem.
That’s sort of the way the left thinks about taxes. Once they have the money, what happens to the victims is none of their problem. They have the same attitude about regulation, too. Whatever burden the regulatory process imposes on business is not their problem.