By: Michelle Carr
As many of you know, I am a work in progress environmentalist. I am not perfect. I haven’t ever claimed to be. I say work in progress because I try every day to be greener yet I know I’m clearly not the best. One of the things I strive to do is to eliminate my usage of single use plastic bags. I have grown quite a collection of reusable bags of various sizes and messages. My reusable bags are something I get quite nerdy and excited about. They kind of make me feel like I have been transported into a pre-plastic bags era, when baskets and cloth bags were used. It makes my Anne of Green Gables loving soul soar.
One of the places I frequent is Jay C Foods. Being an offshoot of Kroger, they have made a commitment to stop issuing single use plastic bags in their store by the year 2025. Though it’s not as quickly as I’d like, it’s still a huge step. Knowing this fact, makes me smile every time I enter their store. It has made me feel like my reusable bags were a little more welcomed here than other places, but today’s experience was a bit different than normal.
I place my reusable bags on the conveyor belt first. This is something I always do in order to not have to make the cashier/ bagger remove items from they’ve bagged in plastic bags. Then I begin to unload my items from the cart. As the cashier hands me my first bag she half turns to the employees conversing behind her and says. “But they are still going to let us use these plastic bags right?” She points to the single use bags attached to her bagging area. In my head, I can’t help but giggle a bit. I know it’s wrong, but seriously the whole point of the change is to eliminate those very bags. Why would they keep them?
“No, in a few years we won’t be using those anymore.” Her fellow employees respond. My cashier looks troubled as she continues to scan and bag my groceries into my REUSABLE bags.
“Well, what are we going to use then?” She questions with a sour tone. Here I know I can help. As I take another one of my grocery filled bags from her hands, I smile.
“Well you will use these.” Understanding this didn’t seem so complicated to me but perhaps to someone who didn’t realize that the stopping of using single use bags meant they wouldn’t be using single use bags, it was. She wrinkles her nose at me.
“I hope not. I hate these kind of bags.” She literally says this as she picks up my next bag. Now here is where I made my conscious decision that I wouldn’t be helping her bag my items as I do with other cashiers. This may have been slightly evil on my behalf, but I wanted her to have to use my bags.
“Well I love them.” I smile, determined not to deter from being polite.
“But they are so dirty. I hate touching them because people bring them in here so dirty.” She holds my bag in a way as if to say she felt mine was dirty. I am dying laughing inside at this point because most anyone who knows me knows that I am quite the germaphobe. I regularly wash my reusable bags, especially after they’ve held meat in them. I will wipe down the big freezer bags with Clorox wipes after every use. The very last thing my bags are is dirty.
“I assure you,” I smile huge at her to keep from laughing. “I wash mine frequently.” In my head I scream with laughter and almost blurt out, “But today, just for you, I rolled them in pig poop right before I brought them in.” Instead I nicely add. “And they are much better for the environment than single use plastic bags.” To this the lady scoffs and places more of my food into one of my bags.
“They are so dirty I just don’t know how people can stand their food being in them.” She turns to the people behind her. “Will they go to paper bags?”
“That is something they are considering.” Her fellow employee answers.
“Good.” My cashier responds. Of course in my head I’m dying thinking that she has exposed herself to more bacteria by touching my packaged chicken and ground turkey meat with her bare hands than she did touching my bags. I’m also shaking my head at the thought of cutting down more trees and causing pollution from manufacturing for what will most likely be single use paper bags. All of it, so that cashiers like this can avoid having to manage using a cloth bag. But then, I look at my bags in the cart. It is very clear from the fact that all of my meat was placed into a more cloth like bag and my toilet paper and potato chips were placed into a cold freezer bag, that this cashier was a novice. She probably still had a lot to learn about bagging, that her limited experience clearly hasn’t shown her yet. Perhaps with more exposure to bagging with reusable bags, her early bagging opinions will change. So as I took my receipt and wished her a happy day, I made a mental vow to help with that learning curve by going through her line often. After all, 2025 will be here before we know it.
Image taken by Michelle Carr - Novice bagging skills