paper or plastic?
i recently paid a visit to my mom in rural pennsylvania. took the bus to elmira new york, where she picked me up and took me to her and her husband's place in the middle of nowhere.
after arriving at the house, she asked me to bring in some groceries that were in the trunk of her car, which, being the good son that i am, i did. she had bought something like 2 cans of beans or something like that and a loaf of white bread - not wonder bread, but something very similar. a loaf of wonder-esque bread weighs probably about 8-12 ounces. that's half a pound. it had it's own bag and the 2 cans were in another bag - double bagged. that's 3 bags for about a pound and a half of groceries.
i always use my backpack to bring my groceries home. whenever i buy groceries in a typical new york supermarket like met food or associated supermarkets i always get attitude when i ask to put my groceries in my backpack. the procedure is always the same - my groceries come ever closer to the checker on the conveyor belt and as soon as they are finished with the previous customer, i alert them to the fact that i will be putting my groceries in my backpack. they never, ever listen. i have to tell them at least 2 additional times before they understand. by the time this happens, they've already double bagged a bag of groceries containing an apple and quart of milk and then are angry and confused at the prospect of having to remove groceries from the bags and hand them to me. some checkers completely ignore me altogether. so i have 4 grocery items and six plastic bags that inevitably end up in a tree or around the neck of some poor aquatic creature.
new york city has a large set of unwritten rules and i think that this is an example of one of them. in new york, the customer demands service, part of that service being having the checkers double bag each item of your groceries it is an illusion that the customer is being catered to or pampered, when in reality it's some bullshit custom that generates tons of garbage a day.
i recently shopped at the met food on grand street. they have an organic section in the fresh produce dept. the organic fruits and vegetables that came in bulk in plastic bags were wrapped in an extra layer of plastic and the alot of them were even packaged in styrofoam, in addition to the second layer of plastic that now protected them. the regular produce was not subject to this bizarre treatment. it's as if to say, we know we have to charge you more money for this, cuz it's organic and stuff, but hey, we've taken extra special care to make sure that these bananas have never faced the possibility of being bruised or touched by an unruly child by wrapping them in needless landfill, so you should feel better about buying them. these actions nullify my reasoning for buying organic in the first place. i am not buying organic because i want to produce more garbage.
i've basically confirmed this theory at my local bodega. i go in there almost every day and every time i have to tell them that i don't want a bag. every time. and i've been going there for years. they even try to put items in bags before i can say anything, because they want to "serve" me and look dejected when i tell them "no bag."
when the chain of protocol is broken - i ask to bag my own groceries, this causes confusion and sometimes even disdain among the workers. why would this customer pay to bag their own groceries? what is wrong with this person? so i end up with tons and tons of bags that basically go from the supermarket directly into the garbage. they were used for maybe 15 minutes and now we have an object that will never go away.
you would think that with the ubiquitous chatter of inevitable environmental annihilation that this type of behavior would decrease, but it's not, it's only getting worse.
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