Hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts, the usual places people on holiday stay. Sometimes they’re self-catered (ie you have to buy your own food and cook it), sometimes I just want to get snacks and stuff that aren’t available where I live. Or I don’t feel like paying Minibar prices for drinks. Or an one of a squillion other perfectly normal reasons for buying stuff while on holiday.
And as Dewey Finn notes, these bag bans usually include department stores and retailers generally, not just the supermarket. So that means when I go to the outlet mall or the chemist or wherever, there’s yet another random cost that’s boosted the price of my shopping.
From my perspective, it’s less about the actual cost (10c isn’t a huge sum of money) and more about the feeling I’m still being ripped off in some small way. It’s not a great impression for visitors, basically.
Yes of course it’s not technically a tax. But for all practical purposes, there is no difference at all. Do you really think a poor person gives a shit which fucking jackass sitting on a pile of money gets to take more of what little she has with some bullshit extra fee?
The retailer does get it. Which kinda makes it worse, since the regressive fee/tax enriches private corporations even further, rather than the state.
Honestly, you’re coming off as the annoying sort of privileged liberal who thinks he knows what’s best for the poor better than they do, and without ever talking to them.
I’m sure that someone shopping for a family of 6-8 uses quite a few bags every week. And if Abuelita, with multiple untreated medical conditions (because that’s how it goes in America), doesn’t bring bags with her even one single time for any reason, it’s guaranteed to hurt someone living under the poverty line. Which as of 2016 is $32,580 for a family of six ($24,300 for a family of four, or $11,880 for someone living alone). And that’s 23.8% of CA’s 38 million people (cite), as of last census.
It’s a choice and not even a difficult one. If the world ever becomes serious about global warming and charging for carbon emissions how would the poor adapt to that?
She’s poor, not stupid. I grew up fairly poor, and people who don’t have a lot make sure to make the most of what they do have. She’ll find herself some reusable bags or improvise some other solution, because she’ll make a point of not letting Big Retail get any more of her money than they have coming.
A: What if she is stupid though? My argument is that regressive taxes are still the wrong way to do things regardless, and
B: Even if she’s not stupid, she may just not have her shit together, for a myriad of reasons (such as the aforementioned untreated medical conditions), and is not always gonna have bags with her. That’s a fact, regardless of how you believe people should ideally behave. And then it does become a clearly regressive tax. And that’s just plain wrong.
Again, doesn’t matter a goddamn iota if you personally are OK with it, or you personally have your shit together enough to have your bags with you every time and never need to buy extra trash bags either, because you craft your own out of hemp or whatever the fuck you do. You know goddamn well that’s not the case with a lot of people.
In the real world, if one’s financial situation is so precarious that less than a buck for some grocery bags is going to wreck it, one had better get unstupid and/or get one’s shit together in a hurry because all the complaining in the world isn’t going to improve one’s lot any.
I’m with you in one sense op, but my counter is to lug my stinky dirty backpack with me into whatever special snowflake shop or store I’m shopping in. I’ve gotten the “sir, you’ll have to check your backpack” line a few times. “It’s not my backpack, it’s my shopping bag. You do want me to shop here, right?”
Just remember, California is the U.S. center for nanny state idiocy. Sonoma county just finished a long delayed repaving of Hwy 12 through “The Springs”,an area habitually short on parking. Their solution was to eliminate all the curbside parking and designate it as bicycle lanes. For the 6 people who use it a day I guess that’s really cool, but for the vast majority it sucks. I guess they think we live in fucking Amsterdam, FFS.
Whatever happened to the biodegradable plastic bag idea?