Dashed out to the grocery store just now to lay in the week’s supplies of vodka and corn chips (and the occasional entree). The store I frequent offers a nickel per bag rebate for bringing in paper grocery sacks, so I grabbed a few before I left. I get to the checkout and hand over my three bags expecting 15 cents off. The clerk only rings up ten cents. Why, I ask. Turns out one of the bags I grabbed isn’t from their store but instead from another grocery in town, so it doesn’t count for the rebate.
This has to be the most ridiculous policy ever. Yes, it was from a different store but the end result was the same. My store didn’t have to use a new bag. This is the first time I can recall encountering [i[literal* nickel and diming.
Why should they pay you to advertise for another store?
Admittedly, that probably has nothing to do with your store’s policy. If I were the store owner or manager, though, I wouldn’t want my goods sent out with a competitor’s logo, no matter how much money it “saved” me. I probably wouldn’t confiscate your grocery sack, but I wouldn’t reward you for it either.
So, you were unfaithful to your local grocery store, that has served you faithfully all these years, asking so little in return, then you get mad when they call you on this infidelity?
If you don’t object to being given an incentive to conserve paper, why object to being given an incentive to shop at that particular store?
Yes, I know, it’s irritating and the second incentive can (as you demonstrated) work against the first. It would have cost them only a nickel to be generous about it (and they’re being pretty generous as it is: I don’t think paper sacks cost them a nickel per). But they’re still mostly on the side of the angels here, I think. There was a store I remember from my distant childhood that gave a coupon good for some amount off your final tally to anyone who brought a shopping cart in from the parking lot and put it away. My parents had five kids, and there were times when everybody went shopping. The ride home was often uncomfortable, but the money we saved would often buy the ingredients for dessert.
Ask the manager if you can get the discount if you bring and use durable cloth sacks with nobody’s logo on them. That would be even better for conserving paper, and the logo of their competitor wouldn’t sully their checkout lanes.
I’ll compound your mundane rant, if I may, with one of my own. My local stores all ring up my purchases, then wait for a machine to add up the items that were on sale that week, calculate the difference in pricing, and then proudly announce that I have “saved” such-and-such an amount. But here’s the thing: they’re not comparing my bill to any other store’s prices for the same items, and they’re not comparing it to some national or regional average, or to the manufacturers’ or producers’ suggested prices, or even to the price they usually charge for those items. They’re comparing it to some mythical higher price that they made up themselves in order to create the difference. So I’m saving money compared to some even higher price that they could think of. Thanks.
Meanwhile, if I were your store’s competitor, and they didn’t have the policy you described, I’d be buying the cheapest bulk paper bags I could find and heading on over there: “Just bag everything individually please. Yes, the dried navy beans too.”
Trader Joe’s offers a weekly drawing for a 25 gift card if you bring in your own bags. I picked up some plastic-cloth-like bags at my local hoity-toity and use them now everywhere. ***Every*** grocery store I've visited in the last month provides .05 credit per brought-in bag. I should mention though that “every” means Safeway, Albertsons, Trader Joe’s and the store I bought them from, Joey Franco’s PW Market.