There has
been talk of late about placing a charge on carrier bags that are issued by
shops, as if this is some new innovation. However, this has been done before,
and quite honestly I don’t really know why it was stopped in the first place.
When I was
a child, people tended to take their own bags when they went to do their weekly
shop. I remember my mother gathering together her sturdy bags without giving it
a second thought. Once in a while, if she bought an extra lot of shopping that
wouldn’t quite fit in the bags, she would select a cardboard box from the pile
provided by the supermarket for customer use.
By the time
I got a Saturday job in Fine Fare (whatever happened to them?) carrier bags
were much more in evidence – but customers were charged for them. Rival
supermarket Safeways (another blast from the past) provided large paper sacks,
which although were more environmentally friendly, were hard to carry as they
had no handles.
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| Re-usable bags don't have to be boring! |
More
recently, customers have come to expect that stores will provide bags for free.
Many shoppers bear little regard to the number of plastic bags that they stuff
their shopping into, or give much thought to the impact on the environment.
Carrier
bags have almost become a habit, they are taken for granted as part of an
average shopping trip.
Supermarkets
such as Tesco and Sainsburys have long offered an incentive, in the form of
extra loyalty points, awarded for every reusable bag used by the customer. I
have often thought incentives (points) work better than punishments (charges)
but sadly in this case many customers have not been persuaded to kick the
carrier bag habit.
I would
quite happily see as much as 5p charged per carrier bag, with proceeds going to
good causes if possible, to hopefully reduce the amount of bags used and see a return to shoppers providing reusable bags of their own. This
is definitely a good habit that we should all get into.
Follow me
on Twitter @shoppersjoy
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