More About Cloth Bags

As Ariana wrote last week, reusable shopping bags are one of the easiest green changes you can make in your lifestyle. So, I'm going to write about them again and share a little about my own experiences with green shopping.

Like her, when I was first introduced to reusable shopping bags, I was skeptical. When I watched Oprah raving about taking your own cloth bags to the grocery store, I scoffed, convinced such a practice just wasn't practical. For one thing, the particular tote bag she gave away to each member of her audience didn't look roomy enough to hold many groceries. And, as a shopper on a budget (unlike Oprah!), my inability to shell out for enough such bags to accommodate my week's groceries for two (and what about one day when there are children in my household, and I have twice the groceries to lug home?) took priority over the environment.

Then, during my weekly grocery run, I saw these for sale in Wal Mart:



On sale for $1 apiece. On closer inspection, one bag appeared roomy enough to fit the gallon of orange juice and the gallon of milk in my shopping cart. And, more importantly, strong enough to carry them. That would cut down on two plastic sacks. If I could fit twice as many groceries into one of these reusable backs as would normally require two plastic sacks (or more, seeing as many cashiers have the tendency to double-bag milk, juice, and canned goods) and do it for say, $5, maybe this reusable shopping bag idea wasn't so impractical, after all.

So I bought five of the bags, and now my weekly grocery shopping looks like this:



I love my shopping bags. My groceries stay more organized now: milk and juice together, cold things together, canned goods together, produce together, etc. I can get my five bags from the cart to the trunk and from the trunk into the house much more efficiently than I used to, with the added bonus of not being worried about plastic sacks breaking under the weight of the food. Maybe best of all, my pantry doesn't fill up with the hundreds of plastic bags that accumulate week after week of shopping, which can't be put in our city recycling bins.

One area that is not at all efficient, however, is getting my groceries from the shopping cart into my bags at the checkout line. This is mainly a problem at Wal Mart, where the checkout lines have bag carousels that make it easy for the checkers to bag groceries. The set-up there is not at all conducive to shopping with reusable bags, and on more than one occasion I've been met with eye rolls and heavy sighs that I'm making their job difficult. One cashier even went on a rant about how Wal Mart shouldn't sell those bags if they're not going to make it easy for the checkers to bag groceries properly. Mostly I have to hold my bags open on the tiny surface on top of the bag carousel for the cashier to put in, or sometimes, I'm expected to bag them myself. The cashiers at Wal Mart don't appear to have been trained in any kind of system for dealing with cloth bags, which is a real shame for Wal Mart's promise of good customer service.

It's not just the regular checkout lines that are problematic. The self-checkout lanes are a huge pain, because they're not programmed to account for the weight of personal shopping bags. You have to scan an item and then select "skip bagging," which really holds things up at Wal Mart, where a store code is required to override the bagging scale.

All that's gotten me to thinking. I really applaud all the retailers who are providing their green-minded customers with an affordable alternative to plastic, and even paper, bags. But that Wal Mart cashier, if rather melodramatic, was right. If retailers really want to encourage eco-friendly shopping, they'll go the extra mile and re-configure their checkout lanes for the convenience of their cashiers, and re-program the self-checkout computers to include an option for reusable shopping bags to keep those lines moving swiftly for their customers. We need to write Wal Mart (and our retailers of choice) and let them know how much green shopping means to them, and encourage them to make the changes necessary to make responsible habits like reusable shopping bags the norm.