Lame rant....grocery bags, WTF?

The BBQ Pit
1

I just must not be saying right.

I always say “paper bags, as few as possible please”. Obviously this means I want the fewest possible number of bags. Even if I can only get plastic bags, I want AS FEW AS POSSIBLE.

Well, baggers were simply not cooperating. So I added “fill 'em up to the top”. I foolishly thought that they would do that. But noooooooooo.

Do baggers get a bonus if they use more bags than anyone else?? Christ, it’s getting to the point where each individual item gets it’s own bag.

A few weeks ago, when they guy started putting my stuff in plastic bags, I told the bagger “paper please, as few as possible!”
What did he do? He put the plastic bags INTO THE PAPER BAGS!!

It’s a fuckin’ conspiracy, I tells ya!!!

Yesterday, I went to Target. I bought the 3rd Season of Friends on DVD and 2 greeting cards. One bag, right? NO. The woman tried to put the cards into a second, smaller bag. When I asked her, politely (I’m always polite), to put them into the bag with the DVD, without the second smaller bag, she reacted as if I’d slapped her!

Look, if I can carry all the items I want to purchase in the crook of my left arm, then all the items I want to purchase can fit in the same goddammed bag. The 6-pack of 24oz Pepsi bottles do not need a bag. They have their own handy-dandy handle for easy carrying! And if they put the 6-pack in a bag, that’s the ONLY item they’ll put in it!

Look, I jsut don’t want all the golldang bags!!

I told one kid to fill the bags up because I wanted as few bags as possible. Ya know what he did? He double bagged eveything!!!

WTF???

2

Take your own bags in with you. String bags take up very little space, while canvas bags are very sturdy. We have string, canvas, and insulated bags that we use for shopping. The insulated bags, in particular, are very nice to have, especially in the summer. We still get the occasional disposable plastic or paper bag when we have a big order, or when we stop in at a store without our bags, but we are no longer overwhelmed with them. I’m an incurable packrat, and it’s almost physically painful for me to throw away something as potentially useful as bags. I know a LOT of uses for them, too…for instance, you can cut plastic bags in long spirallig strips and crochet rugs from them. Very few people DO this, but it’s possible.

Seriously, though, get yourself your own shopping bags, they don’t break as easily and the look on the bagger’s face is priceless.

3

hehehe - yeah - and the trouble is that after enough of that, one just gets sort of sick of trying to do the right environmental thing in shops where they jsut cannot seem to get the concept. :frowning: AND the staff tend to look as though they think the customer is the silly one. BAH!

How about carrying a little rucksack?

4

That alone may be worth the price!

5

WOW - I admit I had never thought of the idea of making plastic rugs. Well, that is something for a rainy day. Creative lot on the SDMB!

6

Actually, the rugs are most useful as doormats. What’s more, they’re machine washable in cool water.

7

The whole state of grocery bagging has gone downhill with the apparent demise of the paper grocery bag. Yes, plastic bags are great most of the time, especially if you have a lot of groceries, and don’t want to make 3 trips to the car. However, the paper bag is superior for your smaller grocery runs, you can get everything in one sturdy bag. It doesn’t roll all over the floor of the car, strewing cans and apples all over the place. When you get home, it sits nicely on your counter waiting for you to unpack it.

8

What he did makes sense. The heavier the bag, the greater the need for it to be double-bagged, for strength.

9

Some places just seem to have too many plastic bags; there aren’t many shops I can think of who will let you out the door without one. One is Superstore, (who charge 12 cents a bag and make you bag it yourself), and the other is my local hardware store, who always forgo the bag if I ask and let me shove my meagre purchase in my pockets.

Every other place is either reticent to follow your bagless instructions or ignore them altogether. I can’t count the number of places where I say “I don’t need a bag”, yet get one anyway. Most of the time it’s due to some odd store policy… though occasionally I suspect that the cashier doesn’t want to go off autopilot until their shift is over.

10

I’ve found I can somewhat reduce bag usage by stacking like items together on the conveyor belt (meats together, cold and/or dairy items together, boxes together, etc). It’s helped somewhat because they’re less likely to dump one box into a bag, rotate the bag carousel around for another bag for some meat, and then never get back around to the single box.

11

I’ll take all the plastic bags I can get.

They make great stuffing for archery targets.

12

I used to work at a coffee shop beside a large grocery store. I can’t count the number of times a customer would come in with a whole bunch of grocery bags and buy a half-pound of coffee (very small!), and look at me as if I was mad if I asked if they needed a bag. Of course they needed a bag ! So I would put the half-pound of coffee in a small paper bag, which they would then put into one of their plastic shopping bags.

Also, I used to buy a dozen bagels every week at this one bagel store. Same place, same clerks, every single week. They put the dozen bagels into a big paper bag, and then (every single week) they put two plastic bags into the paper bag, in case I wanted to put some bagels in the freezer. And every week I said “No plastic bags, please, I have plenty at home.” Every week. Same clerks.

[guilt-ridden former customer service representative confession]One week I went through this - same clerks as every week - “No plastic bags, please” - and got to the front before I saw the clerk at the back of the store putting plastic bags into my bagel bag. I yelled, I had to because she was twenty feet away, but also because I was very frustrated that they didn’t (a) remember that I had done this before or (b) expect that any customer would not want plastic bags. And I had been having a very bad day already. So for the first (and hopefully last) time I had a go at a minimum-wage store clerk. Oh, the guilt ! [/GRFCSRC]

But really, I understand that it’s your job to offer everyone a bag, and customers, it’s your right to have as many bags as you like. But does that mean we have to surrender any independent thought on the subject? Do you really need to stuff that melon into a produce bag, which will then be put into your grocery bag? Come on.

13

This is very common. Not the look as if she’d been slapped, but the use of a separate, smaller bag for the greeting cards. I think most stores do this so that the cards don’t get soiled by anything else that may be in the larger bag. Makes sense to me.

14

Great trash bags for bathroom trash cans, too.

I don’t mind getting a bag usually, but sometimes they get a little “bag-happy.” Like when I buy a loaf of bread or gallon of milk. If it comes in a bag or has a handle, I don’t think it needs a bag.

That’s why I’ve started going to stores with self-checkouts.

15

Paper bags are superior to plastic bags in all ways. I hate hate hate that the default is now plastic bags, and that the check-out people seem to think that every item requires its own separate bag. I’m not joking when I say that I average at least a 90% bag to item ratio every time I shop, assuming I don’t speak up and ask for paper instead. And even when I ask for paper, the check-out person still seems to think that anything even remotely damp (milk, frozen veggies, meat) needs to be put in a plastic bag before being placed in the paper bag. Egad.

And another thing I’ve noticed…since the advent of plastic bags, it seems that check-out people have completely lost any sense of what a properly packed paper grocery bag should be like. When I ask for paper, I invariably wind up with one super-heavy bag that wants to rip into shreds when I try to pick it up because the check-out person put all of my soda, milk and bowling balls in it. The other bag(s) will be of varying weights, with at least one being light as a feather because the only thing in it is a box of tissues and a magazine. WTF?

I’m not going to even go into how my head wants to explode when I ask for paper and get the person fitting the paper bag into a plastic bag, supposedly with the assumption that I’m incapable of carrying a bag unless it has handles. What is this about??

16

Wow. Here in Minnesota, there are very few grocery stores left that bag your groceries at all. You bag your own, and you can bag them however you like. At Cub, you can even choose from paper bags with handles and paper bags without.

I hate plastic bags, especially for groceries. I hate how the handles cut into your hands as you carry them, and they don’t sit up straight in the trunk of your car. You used to be able to take them back to Cub to put in their plastic bag recycling bin, but now they’ve discontinued that service, so what do you do with them all? I don’t have enough little garbage cans to use them all. And the little plastic bags they put around my newspaper are pretty much useless as far as reuse goes–they used to only use them when it was raining, which was fine, but now we must have gotten a new person who uses them every day, even though I’ve got a covered porch. What do I do with these things? Guess I’ll take up archery.

And, yes, gallon jugs of milk do not require a bag! That’s what the kid is for. People understood this when I was a kid, but they seem to have forgotten now. sigh

17

The only thing I like about plastic bags, is being able to string about 7 of 'em on each arm, and carry $200 worth of groceries up the hill to my apartment all at once.

But, I also like Aldi’s, where you bag your own. I bring in a few paper bags from my last trip, and then use empty cartons for the rest. They sit nicely in the back of my van, whose cargo space is tall but narrow, and I can stack them. Much better than a dozen plastic bags sliding and rolling over each other and spilling the contents out.

18

Ha ha ha this is funny. I give the bagger a tough time because I say: Cold stuff in plastic and the rest in paper please. I even seperate the groceries cold/not cold. The bagger starts out doing as I asked but then he shorts a wire and before I know it everything is in one type of bag.

Now I feel bad when the kid (who I think is mentally challenged) doesn’t do it right but when you have the other teenagers who are jackin their jaws about how little money they get or how many kids were at the party last night I have no patience!

I think it is a conspiracy!

19

I hate plastic bags too. Yet, they seem to be the preference for baggers. On several occasions I have asked for paper only to be given 20 little plastic bags. Sometimes they only put one item in the bag!! It drives me nuts.

20

Two uses for plastic bags:

1 - roll them up into tiny little balls, wrap the handles around the balls over and over until you have a compact little ball. Throw it at a kitty. Once you have enough of these, you can throw balls at kitties for 1/2 an hour before you run out and have to collect them all.

2 - kitty potty collection. Double or triple bagged - scoop the kitty litter into them and dispose.