One of my recent problems has been walking into a supermarket and forgetting to bring my own bag. You have to do that around here now.
I moved away at the end of 2012, and when I came back six months later, bags cost 5¢. If you wanted one, which duh?
And then they give you one of those old ⅙-bushel brown paper bags that begin to rip as soon as you touch them, like what we got every time we went grocery shopping in the 1950s. Progress, eh?
But they really expect you to bring your own, and if you walk out of Al's Sooper Markit without a bag, carrying a few goods in your hands, then they want to see your receipt. Unlike if you walk out of Al's Sooper Markit with a bag, carrying a few goods in that bag (which you got at Peggy's House-O-Valu, and carrying Peggy's logo), no one blinks.
Well, pisser anyway. So what do do?
Q: What to do about what?
A: What to do about going into any and every store and forgetting to bring my own bag.
Ah - I finally figured it out: Steal one.
I buzz through the produce section and grab a couple of those clear plastic bags they have hanging there. Some stores even have more than one size/weight option. They're small, but if I'm not buying much, I can use one of those.
Then, on the way out, I also drop my receipt into it, with the store logo facing outward, and don't have to get searched for not carrying my stuff in a $20 "sustainable" heavy cloth shopping bag, or a brown paper one which if I'm really lucky will mostly hold together all the way out to my car.
But wait - there's more. A better idea is to steal some of these produce bags every time I buy something. Then I hang one from a small 3M Command Hook I've stuck onto the passenger side of my car's dash, and use it for trash. Being plastic, albeit lightweight, they're good for both dry trash and wet trash.
I also bought some larger bags for random larger cruft I accumulate, and I can put several of these small bags into one of the larger plastic trash bags, and get the effect of double-bagging if I have something really messy, like dripping food cans, or used toilet paper/wet wipes. (I clean up after myself.) Or worse. (In case I need to do something while squatting inside the car. It happens.)
Neat. This works. I get the bags I need, and since I grab these produce bags only when I buy things, I'm sort of paying for them anyway.
One online vendor chosen mostly at random sells 2000 of these produce bags for $45, which is 2.25¢ each, retail. Wholesale is probably a tenth of that price, so three seconds of the cashier's time reaching for a paper bag to sell me costs more for both of us.
I'm not worrying.
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