In regards to giving credit for the bags, the store’s policy almost certainly is to give credit for bags used. The new cashier probably followed the policy until she noticed that other cashiers didn’t bother with it and didn’t get in trouble for violating the policy, and then decided to save herself and the customers the hassle of counting nickels.
There’s no correct way to bag groceries. The system that you think is perfect and logical and can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t follow is exactly what will drive the next customer up the wall.
There’s one good way to get your groceries bagged how you want: ask politely, and be memorably friendly. Bagging groceries is a mind-numbing job with most transactions passing by as a semi-conscious blur, so those customers who have a friendly conversation stand out. The rare few that actually show that they remember you by bringing up something from a past conversation practically become the store’s VIPs, and get great service.
Really? I also don’t bag the bottles just because later I pack them horizontally at the bottom of the folding cart I use to bring stuff from my complex’s garage to my own apartment. It gets their attention for a second because it’s a minor disruption of their routine, but other than that no problem.
For professionals they’re paid pretty poorly.
If you have preferences or special needs, by all means politely tell them what you want, and they should accommodate you. I don’t, and I figure that, like everyone in retail, they have to deal with some real rude jerks every day, so I generally don’t bother lowly-paid employees over minor details.
They’re just the basic bags that the grocery stores sell. I’ve gotten them from two different stores in my area. I would have thought they all had it, but I didn’t pay too much attention to it.
The supermarket near me, Martin’s (because you’re a Guest, your location doesn’t show), sells canvas bags that have these loops. The bags are 99cents each, and I switched to all-reusable bags by buying one each shopping trip until I had enough for a major shopping trip.
I got mine at Target, but Meijers and Walmart also sell them. I would prefer bags that don’t have the store’s adverstising on them but I’m too cheap to buy them. The “green” bags available at the co-op or online boutiques run as much as 6.00 each! That's a lot of dough for an average weekly grocery load when the commercial ones are only .99 (or $.49 on clearance).
That’s really strange. I LOVE to put stuff directly back into the cart. Less work for me…dunno why they would not like doing that.
This. Thank you so much.
Yeah, but about 50% of people who bring their own bags in, do not bring enough for all of their groceries, so stuffing their canvas/plastic bags is still the quickest and most bag efficient way to get people out of the store.
By “stuffing” btw, I mean in an organized, balanced and stable way that would not harm any of the groceries, that just does not waste any space. I am very good at it.
When I was a kid in the 1980s we used to shop at one of the larger chain grocery stores that had a short conveyor belt to unload your cart and send items to the cashier. Most importantly, there were two lanes with long conveyor belts to send food down to the bagging area after the cashier scanned each item. She would scan and pitch everything down one side and my brother and I would walk or run to the other end of the conveyor belt and bag everything ourselves if there wasn’t a teenage bagboy employed by the store. Then my mom would get out her check book and pay the cashier by writing a personal check. The cashier would flip the gate to open the other lane and start scanning and chucking the next customer’s groceries down the other side of the conveyor belt.
Regardless of who was bagging, everyone seemed to bag their groceries using this universally accepted two-step method:
This required fewer than six paper bags and plastic bags were use to wrap poisons, frozen food items, meats, and dairy to prevent cross-contamination. We always drove to the store, so the weight or balance of the bags was not a concern. A few times I remember the bagger giving us a placard with our cart number on it and we would pull up outside the store and they would put the groceries into our car for us.
Then one day, the long two-lane conveyor belt system was mysteriously replaced by a one-lane shorter conveyor belt system with an employed bagger at the end of the station who bagged your groceries right after the cashier scanned them. This worked fine for a number of years. The baggers were trained according to the universally accepted bagging method and life was grand.
Then one day, the employed baggers were mysteriously gone. Not replaced by other cashiers or attentive store managers. Just gone. I’m not sure if this was due to budget cuts or was federally mandated by the government, but they were just gone and have not returned since. In that span of time, the universally accepted method of bagging has been lost.
To this day, every time I shop at a larger grocery store chain with the one-lane conveyor belt system, they do not allow enough space or time to bag your items properly. The cashiers are always unfriendly and in a hurry to scan the next customers groceries, so she keeps whipping items down the overloaded conveyor belt while they just continue to pile up and get caught in the turbine at the end of the conveyor belt. No matter how neatly I arrange the items in my cart and sort them before giving them to the cashier, they inevitably get caught in the cyclone and are strewn out of order before I can bag them. My breads and produce always get smashed by the heavy boxes or canned goods that get tossed or fall on top of them.
When the cashier has finished scanning my items and I have swiped my card, she almost always immediately starts scanning the next person’s items without putting a barrier or demarcating whose groceries are whose. Inevitably someone’s tampons end up touching my baked goods until I can reach over the counter and rescue them. In the very rare instances where the cashier is not pressed for time or attempting to break the world record for the most items scanned in 60 seconds, she will randomly toss items in plastic bags without rhyme or reason and fling those down the conveyor belt as well. When I get home, I customarily have to search for that stick of deodorant that has gone missing. I usually find it in a plastic bag with a frozen pizza and a box of cereal. Because cashiers are told that deodorant, frozen pizza and cereal belong together in plastic bags. Not the reusable canvas bags I have supplied them with. Nowadays, whether I walk or drive to the store, I would prefer any number of bags if they were bagged correctly as opposed to the mess I usually end up with when I go to the grocery store.
If I were still in grad school, I would most certainly have written my thesis on the topic of grocery store bagging and mysterious disappearance of the two-lane conveyor belts.
I’ll take a bit of an exception with this. A plastic bag is pretty flimsy and a poorly-placed box will tear it. It’s a PITA to have the bag break while you’re carrying it into the house.
As a Trader Joe’s crew member, let me say you are my favorite kind of customer, and always get a hearty “And thank you for bagging” at the end of the transaction.
I was a bagger, then a cashier, back when there were only 13 colonies. I always appreciated those who assisted with the bagging, and I, too, always rolled my (inner) eyes at those who stood there slack-jawed as the groceries piled up like a landfill at the end of the conveyer belt.
mmm
Wow, someone bumped my shopping bag thread. I don’t know exactly when most of the reusable bags available for sale all turned to cheap plastic crap, with handles so long the bottom of the bag scrapes on the ground when I carry them while also being too short and too badly placed to be used comfortably as shoulder straps. Real shoulder straps on shopping bags? A distant memory! When I opened this thread, I still had eight or ten good bags, made of canvas, that I’d acquired over the years prior to that, but then a cat peed on them and I had to get rid of them. My last remaining canvas bag is emblazoned with the Holland America logo and is from a cruise we went on in 2005.
Shopping bag manufacturers don’t want to encourage you to walk to the store and back so you can avoid car trips. The bags they sell us now are geared towards carrying your groceries from the store to your car, and then from your car into the house.