At my grocery store (Magruder’s), we now charge 5 cents for a double bagging w/ plastic and 10 for one w/ paper, b/c of ‘rising oil prices’ which have made the price of bags go up? My only thoughts are- oil prices make everything cost more, like shipping the bags to the warehouses or to our store, or maybe producing the bags. Or- the manager needs more money for his gas. 
Discuss.
Not much to discuss.
Plastics in general are made from petroleum plus the additional costs of transportation and manufacturing process which are affected by petro costs.
Same factors affect paper costs. 
Strange that the paper costs more than the plastic, I would have expected the reverse. Or does it take as much or more petro to make a paper bag, but just less directly than plastic?
“Plastics in general are made from petroleum”
Can I get a simple explanation? How?
Check out this site:
Thanks-
from http://lifecycle.plasticsresource.com/step2.html
Er… here’s what I’ll tell the little old ladies and the other guys who are curious about why they’re being charged: Plastic is made by heating up oil. 
The price of oil does not directly affect the price of grocery bags. Most of the energy needed to make kraft paper, which is what grocery bags are made from comes from the burning of recovered wood solids from the pulping process.
There is supplemental energy required but most pulp mills use either natural gas or coal to provide it. Natural gas is high right now, but coal is less expensive per BTU. Pulp prices are cyclic, and are right now just slightly higher than a year ago, which is still quite low by historical terms.
A 10 cent price for a brown paper bag is pretty close to what the retail cost is, you can buy 5000 at a time for around $400. So, 8 cents is what the bag costs, but the price hasn’t increased by much in the last few years, and may even be lower than before.
Well- I guess that makes my manager a good schemer, doesn’t it? 
But seriously, we used to just charge 10 cents for paper bags people wanted to take anyways, so it makes perfect sense.
Interesting, cos shops here (Australia) say they are charging for the “green factor”, partially as a deterrent so people use less bags (they are encouraged to bring their own bags), and cos they (apparently) donate money to research for better plastic bags (biodegradeable, or whatever).
I am pretty sure the price of plastic bags have not gone up recently, but i am not sure where to find that sort of historical data.
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There are various ways of charging customers for the bags in the U.S. Around where I live, the large supermarket chains give you a credit of 3 cents for each bag of your own that you use for your purchases. Not very many customers take advantage of this discount though. Indeed, the clerks at my local supermarket say that the number of customers who take advantage of this 3 cents per bag credit has actually decreased over the past 10 or 15 years.
Not to hijack, but I think I know one reason why. People are discovering the utility of plastic bags for picking up dog poop. Dog owners, including myself, hoard them, and will often take a ton of extras for the folks at a dog park when visiting.
FWIW, it is standard practice in a number of Yurpean countries to charge some small fee for plastic bags. Many folks either recycle their bags for the next trip to the grocery store, or bring their own cart or tote bag to haul their food back home.
I suppose that the OP’s manager justifies this because of the price of oil, etc., but this should be looked on as part of the cost of doing business.
If I were at the checkstand in any store that tried to charge me for a bag I would leave my groceries and walk out, never to shop at that store again.
Well, I’ll have to respectably disagree with this. If the cost of doing business goes up, then in order for the business to maintain, they must increase costs somewhere. I personally would much rather they charge for bags than to charge more for food. You see, in order to feed my family, I have to buy the food. But I don’t have to buy the bags.
No matter what, you pay for the cost of the bag. It may be by giving you a credit for your own bags, or by charging you for the cost of the bag, or just by increasing the price of items to cover the cost of the bag. In any case, you will pay for the bag. I prefer to bring in my own bag or just to ask for the clerk to not use a bag.
Yes, but you control the food you buy; the baggie-boy controls the number of bags they sell you. I suppose that if you shop in one of the economy, bag-it-yourself-places, well, then of course you should be charged for the bags. The whole point is penny pinching at a place like that. But if any first class, decent, full-service place tried to pull a swindle like that, then they’d have a lot of problems, I imagine.
Practical part of the question: usually I’m paid up and waiting for the bag-boy to finish packing – so now do they slow down the entire fscking process so they can charge me an extra $0.12? Aren’t they losing vastly more than $0.12 in reduced throughput?
We have three big sturdy canvas tote bags for groceries. Each one holds about the same as two paper bags. We’ve been using the same ones for years.
The sack boys aren’t all used to seeing canvas grocery bags, though, and I have to watch to make sure they don’t put the groceries and the canvas bags into plastic.
Marsh Supermarkets will give you a 5-cent credit for each Marsh bag you bring back to reuse. However, the bestids won’t give me any bag credit for my cloth bags.