the people before me at Penney's didn't want a bag for their purchases and

you'd have thought the world was coming to an end. The lady who checked them out and the man at the other register exchanged baffled looks and spoke several times about how odd that was.

An "undercover" security guard came over to discuss the transaction with the clerk, interrupting my wife and I as we were making our purchase to demand the details. Then he walked quickly over the door through which we left and spent the next five or ten minutes staring out the window at the group as they walked to their car. He was still there, monitoring them, when we left.

Not putting your merchandise in plastic bags is a threat to national security, apparently. :rofl:

and I also sometimes refuse bags at other stores and I too get strange looks.

Hello! I'm just taking the item and walking out to my car. Why do I need a bag that I will use for 20 minutes that will be in a landfill for 20,000 years?

People don't seem to realize the waste they are creating by over-bagging.

I'll get people who look at me like I'm crazy or who ask me three times because they don't believe me. I kind of get a chuckle at their reactions, but it is sad how so very people really think about that kind of waste. There are some stores you go to where they'll put EVERY SINGLE ITEM in it's own bag. (This used to drive me nuts about wal mart when I still went there.)

But I'd never seen a reaction quite like what I saw today--they seriously didn't know how to cope with it :rofl:

for their single item that was already in a bag!!! The worst was we had a customer that insisted on wrapping every individual item in a plastic grocery bag. She'd come in get a couple things from the deli, a few containers of yogurt and some apples. She had to do this so the fruit wouldn't bruise. I'm sorry, but am I the only one that sees the idiocy of shopping at a natural foods store and then requiring 17 plastic bags for your 7 items. Gah! She was such a bitch.

looks.

Go Australia!

The alternative would be having to wash the trash bins every couple of days. Now THAT would be ecologically unsound.

about 10 of them. We get a mix of emotions from cashiers. Some see no problem with it. Others think it is the end of the world.

"Are you going to put EVERYTHING in the bags?"

Me, "Yes, they hold a lot."

Them, "But they will be heavy"

My thought "Oh no, whatever to do!" However I say, "It's better than throwing those plastic bags in the trash"

Now when we shop for groceries we look for the cashiers who have been most helpful for us.

What really pisses my wife off is when we tell them we have our own bags and they try to put the milk in a plastic bag and THEN into the canvas bag.

I occasionally get asked again, but that sounds insane

from the monsters on Maple Street. Haven't you heard? :tinfoilhat:

stuffing extra items into a bag, than it would be to see if they gathered more stuff on the way out. Without the bags there is no visible cue to see that these people have already done their shopping and could disguise shoplifting as normal, pre-register behavior.

and they left immediately after paying for their stuff. And they didn't have a lot of stuff, from what I could see.

But you makea good point about browsing without your stuff in bags.

I use canvas bags when food shopping and try to rarely get bags otherwise. I have two dogs and still seem to always have plenty. Once I was a Target, getting a bucket and a few other items. The women checking me out didn't seem to understand that I didn't need a bag and that the bucket was just as good (heck, better) for carrying my items out of the stores. Asked me about 4 times whether I wanted a bag. I would think that stores would try to get their employees to be stingy with bags, but they really seem to push them on you. I'd be all for a bag tax.

I'm a cashier and I get people asking me to put the oddest things in bags. Or asking me to double bag things that don't need double bagged.

I worked at a natural foods store though, so customers that wanted unncessary bags would recieve the scorn of the employees.

them. How pointless is that?

I said "just put everything in the container, and give me the receipt". Naturally the security guard stopped me and went through the whole container, checking everything against the receipt, even though he saw me leave the check-out line.

.. I refuse to take a paper bag for the one can of orange juice concentrate I have just bought: I am near the door, having just gone through checkout, waiting for some friends who had bought more than I had, when the manager comes huffing over red-faced.

What do you think you doing?
Uh, waiting for my friends to check-out?
Your orange juice isn't in a bag!
So?

The conversation spins around thus, without making the slightest sense to me, the manager becoming louder and angrier, and I finally have an inspiration that he thinks I'm shoplifting.

Look! Here's my receipt!

But no: this merely pours gasoline on the flames.

You have to take a bag.
No, I don't.
Our store policy requires you to take a bag.


Nothing works. We circle this whirlpool for a while, the manager becoming louder and more red-faced until I am sure he will pop some cerebral vessel.

I don't want a bag. No dice.
I'm saving you money by not taking a bag. Nope, that doesn't soothe him either.

Finally, he is speechless: trembling with pent-up rage from his confrontation with this dangerous lunatic threatening the foundations of life-as-he-knows-it. Amazingly, I do not lose my temper. My friends come through check-out.

The manager, triumphantly, gets the last word.

THEY got a bag. Hey! Tell your friend ...

:shrug:

But that was 30 years ago. I thought that, by now, not taking bags was a common practice ...

:wow:

I didn't want the bag, so the girl at the counter grabbed one, balled it up and put it in the garbage :wtf:

it sounds weird, but fits with the whole corporate bureaucratic bean-counting vibe. I suspect also that the checkers and clerks get a lot of crap if they don't do the same thing procedurally every time.

also, I wonder if the sec. guard was waiting for the bagless people to come right back in and return the items they bought. Who knows?


I used to carry those cotton fishnet bags for shopping, I ought to start doing that again.

:rofl:

But seriously, most stores--at least the bigger chains--are so reckless with their bags anyway, particularly the plastic ones. If you ask for paper (at those stores that still do paper), they are usually more careful and pack them more fully. That's my experience anyway. I try not to get bags, though ...

All these posts are. That guard staring out the window...Twilight Zoney for sure.

picked up the 4th season DVD at the video store yesterday. Good stuff :)

and most people bring their own bags! A lot of people use thermosacs too because they're *shudder* walking or taking the bus!

Of course the stores always offer a top quality reuseable bag for under $1 in pretty, bright colors with their logos on them, etc.

We recycle our grocery bags for lining trash bins and picking up our dog's poop, so we take the bags.

It was odd to have to bag our own groceries at first. Now it makes perfect sense.

AND the cashiers all SIT DOWN in chairs! Imagine that! Too darned civilized!

other times, its just pointless - a bag to carry my V-8 up the elevator from the lobby to my office? Bags for trash cans and storage boxes?

We dont have recycling pick-up at our apartment complex, so we cart all our glass, aluminum, plastics and paper to a nearby recycling center, and need lots of bags to do so. They end up in with the paper or plastic, so I rationalize that... Its nice - we have a garbage disposal, and between that and the recycling, we hardly have any trash (other than bags of cat leavings)

It seems strange, but it does keep things from rolling around in the back of the car.

And one for the dog to ride in the cart in the store as well.

surveillance! Sure hope he wrote up an incident report.


:crazy:

Of course, if they already had a bag they could add their purchases to, or brough their own re-usable shopping bag, that would have made things easier.

I used to work in a copy shop. One day I just stopped asking people if they wanted bags or putting orders in bags. Almost no one ever asked for a bag. People who really needed them would ask but most people did fine without them. I hate to sound too elitist but people are generally passive and take the path of least resistance.

trash can.. and they put it in a bag. When I got home, I took the little can out of the bag and put the bag into the trash can."

Such repudiation of pointless consumption is surely unpatriotic...

A lot of times when im buying just one item I say I dont need a bag and nobody gives me a hassle.

Guess they are not "addicted to oil"? :sarcasm:

purchased the items from! The entire structure of our society depends upon it! We can't have people running around with canvas bags or NO BAGS! Our entire culture would fall down and die. Think of the children!

About a week ago I was in our local grocery (which I visit weekly, and where half the staff knows me by name) and picked up 1) A gallon of milk. 2) A bottle of baby fruit juice. 3) A chocolate creme Home Run Pie. Since the milk and juice were large, heavy, and had handles, they typically don't get bagged. The checkout bagger started to bag the Home Run Pie by itself, so I stopped him and told him not to worry about it. He handed me the pie, which I slipped into my front pocket. I made it halfway to the door before the manager caught me.

M: "What are you DOING?!?!!!"

X: "Umm...leaving?"

M: "What's that in your pocket?"

X: "A Home Run Pie"

M: "Why is it in your pocket?"

X: "Because my hands are full"

M: "Why isn't it in a bag?"

X: "I didn't want a bag for one tiny thing"

M: "I think you need to go pay for that, put it in a bag, and not come back here"

X: "What? I already paid for it! I'm not paying for it again"

At this point the cashier walks over and butted in to tell the manager that I did pay for it. The manager fired back that he KNEW that I paid for it, he saw me put it in my pocket at the register, but that we JUST WEREN'T ALLOWED TO PUT THINGS IN OUR POCKETS. He looked straight at me and said "You are NOT leaving this store with that in your pocket".

I came to two conclusions at that point. First, this man had "issues" that I wasn't going to work out with him right there in the checkout aisle...it would take someone with a PhD and some good drugs to fix whatever problems he had. Second, I really need to start shopping somewhere else.

I pulled the Home Run Pie out of my pocket, ate it in three bites, and left before his head exploded.

about how their insane manager is driving away customers. Hey, it's their company, they should be informed.

It's a small, local, family owned grocery, and as I understand it the manager is one of the family.

The last words the manager shouted at me were "don't come back here" (he really freaked when I shoved the food into my mouth), so I don't think it matters much anyway. Still, I may go in one of these days...I've met the owner before and I know that he usually works weekday mornings. He'd probably be interested to know that his son/brother/cousin/whatever is harassing customers.

your phone number and you don't give it to them. The people in line can't believe you aren't going along with what has been requested of you!

It's fun to see the reaction when you say politely, "I'd rather not give out my phone number."

I was waiting in a long line and the person ahead of me said that. I said the same thing, and there was a buzz down the whole line, "You mean we don't HAVE to give out our numbers?"

Ah, sheeple...

And I've never had any problems whatsoever. BUT, I do notice many times that people in line do look shocked, like "WTF? You don't have to give your number?"

behind you, as you said. It's subversive as hell where they are concerned. We may have woken up a few sleepers!
:bounce:

:nopity:

While still shopping if im hungry, and just letting the cashier know that i already ate the merchandise, but heres the package so she can charge me....

Sounds like a typical "Barney Fife" type guard to me.

I'd seen him in the store a couple of times while waiting for my wife to make her selections. He was dressed normally, t-shirt and jeans, looked like he was in his mid-20s. I thought he was just a customer, didn't even realize he worked for the store. But then he came up to the register during our transaction, and had a walkie-talkie as he hustled over the door to scope out the "perps." Maybe he was just a concerned citizen, though :rofl:

I've been refusing bags since my college years in the early '80s -- heck, even before that, in the '70. Even then, a cashier would understand. I remember hearing, "Save a tree, huh?"

Twenty years ago, some cashiers might have been puzzled by my refusal of a bag. But it rarely happens now; I think the cashiers following some sort of customer-service protocol or as store policy to identify purchases are the ones who are a little puzzled.

But, now, many stores ask me if I want a bag (chain stores more than family-owned ones).

This is California, although a very red part, but it's apparently more environmentally conscious than other parts of the the country where the practice of refusing shopping bags is apparently not common or understood.