Practical and practically unbreakable. Bringing an oil drum to the
checkout line is kind of like driving a Tesla or a Prius to show that you think
every day is Earth Day.
Starting March first,
New York State will ban most plastic shopping bags. The law is heaven-sent to
environmentalists and to the corner grocer. The state wants you to bring
your own. They’re thinking those germ
germinating cloth bags. We’re thinking
paint buckets and oil drums.
The grocer can sell you
paper bags at a nickel per. New meaning for a drug abuser term, “Nickel bag.”
Assuming there’s no sales tax on paper grocery bags that’s not all that much.
But if they DO tax ‘em that nickel jumps to just under six cents within
NYC limits. No doubt, they’ll round it up to a full six.
Some items still will
get plastic bags. Fruit, vegetables, prescription drugs. Probably some other
items. But those are the majors.
You may not know this,
but stores aren’t required to supply bags. Some of the warehouse clubs never
offered them. Cheaper for them, cheaper for you, better for the landfill
and if you’re buying ketchup in 50 bottle quantities, they probably come
already boxed.
There are alternatives
-- real ones -- to plastic bags and 50 gallon steel drums. Bankers’ boxes. Just
bring a couple of them to market, fill them as you go through the aisles and
let the checkout clerk unpack and repack them. It’ll slow the line. But
so does packing those cloth bags.
Picnic coolers are
pretty good, too and they fit neatly in most shopping carts. Or how about
a canoe? That may be a little awkward in a shopper traffic jam. But if you have
a bicycle bell or horn on your cart, people will clear a path for you.
Just be careful not to knock anything fragile off the shelves.
And you can stop blaming
the former mayor for creating a nanny state. It’s been around longer than
most of us. And it’s in our cultural
DNA.
Final thought: you can
order stuff on an app and get your groceries delivered in most places nowadays.
That’s one way to help both the environment and the further the retail
apocalypse at the same time.
GRAPESHOT:
-New pet peeve: Grammar
apps that insist-every-damn-pair-of-words needs either a hyphen or to be
squished together into a singleword.
I’m Wes Richards. My
opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Any questions? wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2020
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