What? I didn't get that..pay for my grocery plastics because...

This is a first I have heard of the customer paying for their grocery bags. in the us at walmart stores you can buy you on resuable bag and put your grociers in it instend of useing plastic bags. everone ealse uses plastic bags here, paper bags were used at one time and is still used in some places.

It is quite common in my area here, where we need to pay for the plastic bag if we don't bring along our own bag. Nowadays, there are more and more shopping malls and even some shops also started to charge us from around 10 - 20 cents per plastic bag. At first, i am not familiar to it and do felt angry about this matter. Now, i always bring along my eco-friendly bag with me, whenever i am out from my home. I always bring a few bags with me during shopping, since i can collect points with it. It is good to see those points will be converted into cash coupon, where we can use for buying daily household items.

I definitely would be finding somewhere else to shop. My husband and I use reusable shopping bags, but that is something we do for our convenience and that of the store's and the environment. Forcing your customers to "do or pay" never works well. In the same respect, I won't work for free at grocery stores, so I never use the self check outs. It's another way to cut money spent (this part I can understand) and cut jobs (this I can't) that I'm not going to support. This reminds me of banks that start charging fees if you get paper statements sent to your home. Because of a mistake made on my bank's behalf years ago back when I used e-statements, I now get all paper statements in my business account. If they were ever to start charging for statements, I'd make sure to stop in the bank at least once a month and go to a customer service desk to get a printed copy. If they charged for that, I'd leave despite being a customer since my parents opened an account with them when I was ten weeks old. As a business owner myself, I understand cutting costs. But if you're going to force something on a customer, expect the morale of both customers and employees to go down the drain--and understandably. Offer benefits to the customer for bringing their own bags (which my grocery store did for awhile, and boy did it work!), but don't force them to only use one option to avoid a fee. Please go elsewhere in this situation...get enough people to stop spending money there, and it'll make a statement.

Are you speaking about Mumbai Here in Orissa also plastic bags are banned, but no body observes, all know these plastic bags are NOT biodegradable, clog drains, intestine of cows, cause dummy flodd in streets during rains.. Thanks for sharing Best of luck. Professor

Hi straw! We also have that thing going in Thailand. Actually, there's a mall that promotes eco-friendly day here. We don't have to pay for the plastic bag on that day, but we can get 5% discount from the things we bought if we don't use plastics. Anyway, instead of giving incentives, your grocery store opts to discourage you to use plastics by paying a fee for each bag. I think Bench is doing the same strategy. If my memory serve me right, I think we were charged a few bucks by using their plastic bags on their "paper bag" day. Oh well!