(Paper) Bag Lady



Hubby, The Kiddies and I were coming home from Target this afternoon.

Earlier in the day The Boy asked if we could have tacos for dinner. Considering all he ever responds with when I ask him what he'd like for dinner is pizza, I decided to indulge him. Besides, everyone likes tacos, right?

Realizing we didn't have the dinner fixings for tacos we made an unplanned stop at Lucky.

You can probably guess, or at least you won't be surprised when I tell you that we are not the type of organized family what keeps a stash of reusable bags in the trunk. We have them and use them but they are usually kept in the little cubby under the microwave stand and not in the car. Needless to say, we didn't have any reusable bags to use for this trip to the market.
We bought our stuff and aside from the gallon of milk and 6 pack of beer I bought, we got paper bags for everything else.
The checker seemed perplexed when he asked me how many bags I wanted and I told him I needed as many as were needed for my groceries.

As we were leaving I saw this guy who didn't get a bag. He was balancing about (no exaggeration) 20 small items on top of a frozen pizza. I wanted to shout "get a bag, dude. It's only a dime."
Now, like I said, I use reusable bags. I use them about 90% of the time. Sometimes I don't bring them to use for my groceries on purpose. I use paper bags. They are great for recycling, compost, covering books, and making robot costumes. Paper bags are handy and sometimes necessary.

I am supportive of banning plastic bags. I also support charging a dime for paper bags. I am not opposed to leaving my reusable bags at home when I need to refill my stash of paper bags and I don't freak out if I forget my reusable bags and have to get paper.

A dime isn't that much money but charging for bags does make people stop and think about how many bags they waste and hopefully it'll teach them to take more positive steps towards not wasting resources.