Grocery bag ban?

Last updated on: April 27, 2014 at 9:39 pm by Jane the Actuary

Grocery bag ban? 2014-04-27T21:39:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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These are some images of German shopping bags pulled from Google images–

The first of these was very common, and perfectly suited to the traditional German shopping practice of many small trips rather than one large weekly trip. The second is one that was fairly practical, since it clips to the cart so you don’t really need to pack your groceries; they just land in there (again, assuming you don’t have that many). The third is rather similar to a scrunchable/foldable shopping bag that I picked up at Aldi yesterday; the applique on the bottom right of the bag has a drawstring so that the entire bag compresses into a small ball. It seems fairly clever but I’m not sure how durable it’ll be, or how easy it’d actually be to pack groceries in and carry them home. The last of these was an alternate solution, a collapsible crate that fit inside the shopping cart — the only disadvantage is that it’s pretty heavy once it’s filled with groceries.

And here’s the reusable shopping bag that our local grocery store sells:

Meijer Reusable Shopping Tote Bag - Blue

Which is OK but not great. The ones I bought when they first introduced them were pretty good, sturdy with a heavy plastic base inside so that the bag would stand and it was easy to pack The more recent ones had a flimsier plastic base and the fabric is already starting to tear.

Of course, in Germany, the entire shopping experience is different than in the U.S. There is no such thing as the cashier bagging your groceries, let alone a separate bagger. The cashier scans your groceries, and then you’re on your own. Sometimes I frantically tried to get the groceries in bags while the cashier scanned them, only to give up and dump the rest into the cart when she started scanning the next order. Other times I ended up just dumping everything in the cart, and bagging everything as I transferred them into the car. In any case, for my first year there, it was more complicated by having a two-year-old in the cart. Aldi was better than most stores, in that there was a counter for packing groceries, which the other stores didn’t provide. Walmart (which has since given up on the German market, but that’s another story) also provided a packing counter, and American-style plastic bags to boot. And, thinking back, I found that I really couldn’t remember how my fellow shoppers managed — whether they just had fewer groceries than I did, or more skill at packing them, or just didn’t care because they were used to it. Maybe I was too frantic about what I was doing to notice.

One consequence of the lack of plastic bags is that you actually needed to buy plastic bags when, in the U.S., you’d just reuse the grocery bags — as trash bags, for cleaning the cat litter, etc. Dog poop wasn’t as much of an issue because Germans weren’t very good at picking up after their dogs anyway.

(I would always say that Germany was great during the summer, when the opportunities to take the streetcar into the city, or bike to the beergarden, or take a trip out into the countryside or to a castle or the mountains outweighed the inconveniences of daily life. But in the winter, when there weren’t many such fun activities, and when loading unbagged groceries into the car was all the more unpleasant, and when carrying the groceries through the parking garage, up the stairs, across the walkway and into the house, in the cold was all the more a hassle — not so great.)

When we returned to the U.S. and Meijers brought out their reusable bags, I figured I’d be environmentally friendly and use these. What I discovered: first of all, I tended to end up with the bags buried at the bottom of the shopping cart, and I wouldn’t manage to pull them out (or even remember them) until the cashier was halfway through bagging my order; and, second of all, it took the cashier a lot more time to bag the groceries into these bags than into regular plastic grocery bags. I always felt like I was holding up the people behind me. Plus, I forgot them at home more often than not. (If you forget your bags and you’re at Aldi, you end up taking some of the boxes that are on the shelves — they leave the products in the boxes at Aldi, to save labor — and trying to fit your groceries in them, and then trying to fit the boxes into the recycling bin afterwards.)

So I’m thinking of this in the context of the plastic grocery bag ban under discussion in Chicago, which I would suspect will end up being approved, since that’s the way things work in Chicago. The latest is that plastic bags will be banned for chain stores (3 or more stores) and franchise retailers with stores greater than 10,000 square feet in August 2015, and smaller stores a year later, with mom-and-pop retailers and any sort of restaurant (e.g., for carry-out food) exempt entirely; it’s passed a committee and will go before the whole Council next week. (See “City Council Panel Passes Plastic Bag Ban” among other sources.)

Is it the end of the world? There are ways to adapt, and I’d sure rather use reusable bags than paper bags, which are awkward to carry, and I wouldn’t entirely trust them anyway. But, in a perfect world, in which the City Council was a genuine deliberative body, I’d rather they not base their decision on what seems most “enviornmentally correct” but ask themselves these questions:

Are there people who will not just be inconvenienced, but harmed by the ban?, and

Are there unintended consequences which mean that the noble intent of the ban will be foiled and it’ll do more harm than good?

Who will a ban harm? Well, first of all, retailers near the city limits, to the extent that this inconvenience pushes shoppers for whom a city grocery store and a nearby suburban one are otherwise equal in distance, price, and quality, to choose the suburban one. Secondly, all shoppers, to the extent that prices go up as retailers need to hire more staff due to the fact that it takes longer to bag groceries into a shopper’s reusable bags, than plastic bags, and, to a lesser extent, due the increase in cost for paper vs. plastic bags. Third, shoppers for whom the free plastic bags eliminate the need to buy bags for doggie doo-doo or other uses.

Certainly, car-using shoppers have to get into the habit of keeping bags in the car. And vacationers in self-catering apartment-type units are inconvenienced because one can’t reasonably bring grocery bags along on the airplane. What about shoppers who rely on mass transit, or their own two feet to get to the store, for whom carrying groceries in handled bags is a lot easier than paper bags? Actually, I don’t understand why some kind of shopping cart (see my post from September) isn’t more prevalent, because even carrying plastic bags isn’t a good solution anyway.

Unintended consequences? The biggest one, as Eric Zorn points out, is that paper bags are not especially environmentally friendly, in the processes used to produce them and the greater bulk and weight in transporting them. If all a plastic bag ban does is produce a shift to the same quantity of paper bags, nothing much is accomplished (though at least paper bags are biodegradable, and I’ll have to admit that, non-environmentalist that I am, it did spook me when I read about the mass quantities of plastic fragments floating in dead zones in the Pacific Ocean, though I don’t know that you can really attribute it to plastic bags blowing there from Chicago). There’s also the issue that if you’re not diligent about washing a bag that’s had raw meat possibly contaminating it, you can end up making yourself sick. (At Meijers, the cashier would always bag the meat in a separate plastic bag before putting it in the reusable bag, which I would imagine would no longer be an option under the proposed ban.) And I’ve read that reusable bags really need to be reused quite a number of times before they prove to be better for the environment, in terms of the cost of producing the bag, than plastic bags.

In any event, so far as I can tell, none of the reporting I’ve seen indicates that the City Council has considered any of these issues, or tried to quantify them in any way — which means that the individual Aldermen are making their decisions based on fluff and general impressions, rather than based on data. And that fact is more irritating than a ban itself.

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