Paper or Plastic?

I was at Fred Meyer today, doing the monthly provision re-stock and had a revelation at the checkout...I hate plastic bags. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for the recycleability and the conservation aspects of the bags, in fact, plastic bags are a good thing. There are several downsides, however, about the plastic bag phenomenon.

First of all, half of my groceries don't even qualify for bag status anymore...Milk, toilet paper, paper towels, cleaning products, soda pop. They just get put back in the basket all alone. I mean, if I didn't want my groceries packaged, I'd go to Costco. The other thing...Instead of putting my groceries into 3 or 4 nicely organized paper bags, I now get to bring home 18 bags with about 3 or 4 items in each bag. Fun. And what do you do with all of these bags? Recycle them? I try to reuse as many as possible, but there's only so much dog poo that I can pick up. At least the paper bags seemed valuable. Growing up, we always had a cabinet reserved, just for nicely folded paper grocery bags. Plastic bags don't fold right, you can't organize them.

The side problem with plastic bags is that the checkers never learn proper bagging technique anymore. They can just throw random stuff together, and never understanding the science behind bagging...Boxes and hard stuff on the bottom, eggs and chips on top.

And finally, have you noticed that they don't even ask if you want paper anymore? It's a "special request". I long for a world where paper bags are the default storage medium for groceries again. But I am just one man.
 posted by Jeff @ 10:06 PM