Holding the Bag

Sunday is my day for grocery shopping, so I went to the store this morning. Washington state, in an effort to increase the use of reusable bags, has banned most businesses from using single-use plastic and requires that they charge for paper or more durable plastic bags.

I tended to prefer paper to plastic long before this happened, and being the forgetful sort, had built up a modest stock of paper bags, which I now use to avoid paying for new ones. Some of these bags are several years old at this point, and they have drawn comments from store employees. A common comment is that the older bags are better made, and hence more durable, than the current bags.

And this makes a certain amount of sense. A store that's giving away free paper bags with every purchase is incurring an expense; every time that a customer reuses a bag, that's one less that the store has to part with. But when a store is effectively selling bags to customers, when a customer reuses that bag, the store misses out on a small amount of revenue that's nearly all profit. And so why spend money on better quality bags?

None of this is meant to be an argument against the state's policy. After all, people were terrible about making sure that the plastic bags were properly disposed of. The reusable bags, however, are a slightly different matter when compared to paper, but it is what it is. But while the lowering of bag quality was certainly an unintended consequence of the policy, I suspect that it shouldn't have been an unexpected one.