Last night my husband and I stopped off at our neighborhood grocery store—the one where we do our last-minute shopping for essentials like beer and half-and-half. We did our usual quick circuit through the aisles, and landed at checkout in under a minute.
The worker at the register was unfamiliar to me, but the other young woman sitting nearby was an employee we’ve seen many times before. As we put our two items on the belt, she called out briskly, “They don’t want a bag!”
This made me grin. Apparently, our message is getting across. We have been on the no-bag warpath for years, refusing the plastic devils at hundreds—no, thousands—of retail locations across this great land, and we enjoy cataloging different reactions on the part of clerks. I’m sure many of you are familiar with these: Some clerks are unfazed. Some are puzzled but happy to oblige. Some are literally baffled—if they can’t put your bag of tortilla chips inside another bag, what on earth are they supposed to do?
One strange obstacle we’ve run into is the assertion of some grocery store clerks that they are legally required to put beer and wine in a bag. We find this frustrating, since it is certainly no easier to carry a six-pack inside a bag than just to grab it by the built-in cardboard handle. I wasted a bunch of time just now looking through the code of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, and found no language about bags. Am I missing it?
How many of you have made the switch to reusable bags and/or no bags at all? Anybody else have their local grocery clerks trained?
