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COVID’s Silver Lining
On my weekly trip to the supermarket, I was stopped as I walked in by a long-time and very competent store employee who told me that no longer can we bring our own bags from home. Instead we have to use plastic bags.
Hallelujah. A hoped-for consequence has fruited.
Published in General
Yep. I will confess (however) that I view this as an opportunity NOT TO BAG AT ALL in the grocery store. I do the scan-and-go thing, where I scan my own items and check out quickly, and when I get to the car in the parking lot, I put the purchases in the bags I choose, and in the coolers I choose, which are already in my car and which I brought with me. I LOATHE getting home and finding that someone has put one, or two, items in a grocery bag, and now I have all these plastic bags I don’t want. (Whereas three or four might be useful for re-use purposes, somehow, I have eleven or twelve. This gripes me.)
So, in this one sense at least, the “new normal” is right up my alley, and I don’t mind at all, although perhaps for different reasons than some.
A significant percentage of those who bring their own bags give off a strong Crazy Cat Lady vibe. EVERY time I see them pile the bags onto the conveyor, I think “I know they keep those damn things in the back room, tucked behind the litter box. “
I always look like I am disaster-buying because I have eight people, five of whom are fully grown adults, two of whom are teenage boys (read “locusts”) living at home. We go through a gallon to a gallon-and-a-half of milk and a loaf or more of bread each day.
We always have reused plastic grocery bags and have never found that we had too many (this is over more than 2 decades of married life).
I’ve liked using the reusable bags, but I don’t like being forced to use the one or the other — I like deciding for myself.
I’m looking forward to the local supermarkets adopting the scan-as-you-shop method that allows you to never ever have to put your groceries on the cashier’s conveyer belt, so you can pack your cart once, rather than the multiple times required by the shop, unload, bag, reload method.
New York made a stupid law last year banning plastic bags throughout the state, so I was required to use them.
Vectors. For. Disease.
Another favorite tic: Why does someone, who definitely looks like they are disaster -buying, maybe two full carts, do so at 11:30 at night when they KNOW there’s only one register open…
I used to love shopping in the middle of the night because my babies would be sleeping. It would be me and the bachelors, as I’d tell my husband when I got home.
How about bringing your own shopping basket from home?
We don’t happen to have any shopping baskets, but I like when Mrs R takes our re-usable plasticky-cloth bags to the grocery store. It means fewer bags are needed to pack things up, and that means fewer trips to haul the results of her hunter-gathering expedition into the house. And if there is one thing we’ve learned from this coronavirus crisis, it’s that my personal convenience and my personal risk are more important than the national interest.
We had a conditional plastic bag ban for a while where I am in Texas, until the state Supreme Court struck all bag bans down. Stores couldn’t have single-use plastic bags, but it was OK to have the next-level-up bags, which were reusable, but not the big, bulky plastic totes people think of as reusable bags. I actually liked the compromise, because Walmart still had plastic bags for groceries and other items, but they were really nice ones that wouldn’t split open at the bottom unexpectedly as you were taking stuff to your car in the parking lot (Once the ban on bag bans was put in by the court, they went back to the cheapies, as did the other stores in town that hadn’t simply switched to paper bags).
I was told not to come in with my reusable bags.
Maybe we have rules like that now, too. It has been a good month since we’ve seen the inside of a grocery store.
Yup, plastic bags even at the granola and save the planet food store. Priorities.
If the boomer remover kills all the boomers our deficit problems go away. Think about it. We don’t have unfunded liabilities if we just get rid of the liabilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziLbXt30hcs
cough on the elderly… for america.
There is a corollary to this: Why, when it’s 11:30 at night, and there’s no-one else in the WalMart and no line at the register, does it still take me 20 minutes to get through and pay?
Because either the receipt paper jams or runs out, or one of my items isn’t in the database and won’t scan, so someone has to be found to go back and check the price, or one of my items scans at the wrong price, so someone has to be found to go back and check it, or the bag of frozen peas bursts, and they go all over the belt, so someone has to be found to go back and get another one . . .
It. Never. Fails.
Maybe Walmart has a timer connected to the systems to make sure?
That works except for the night that the SNAP deposits are entered into the user accounts.
Oregon’s ban on plastic bags went into effect January first, but was “suspended” during the pandemic. The prog’s will never admit they were wrong and change the law. In the meanwhile, some stores won’t let let customers use reusable bags, others don’t care.
Just realized this post should be titled COVID’s Plastic Lining!
Although, we recently learned that maybe changing a post title isn’t the best idea…
Funny! Thanks for the belly laugh.
Excellent point!