12/27/2006

Plastic bag mysteries

Filed under: — Aprille @ 3:33 pm

Denny and I were at KMart yesterday picking up a couple of small things. As we were paying up, Denny said to the cashier, “We don’t need a bag.”

She looked at him like he had just suggested that she pluck out each of her body hairs and feed them to him with chopsticks. Then she said, with a certain tone of self-righteousness, “Well, you’re getting one anyway.”

She proceeded to put our two small items into a plastic bag, the very kind of plastic bag that fills Denny with such rage that he can barely maintain his politeness when I forget to take the reusable canvas bags to the grocery store. As she was doing it, I said, “That was weird,” but she either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

What kind of strange customer service is that? Denny wanted to do something that’s a positive environmental move as well as saving her company money, and she actually denied him that request. I assume it was just because she had been trained that customers get bags, and it was beyond her comprehension to veer from that plan. I hope it wasn’t outright maliciousness. That would be very strange.

In unrelated news, she had those weird kind of bangs are a C-shape, so they start in her scalp, curl out so they’re about an inch off her forehead, and curl back in again to touch her forehead above her eyebrows.

I should also note that Denny doesn’t actually get churlish when I forget the canvas bags.  He just looks like he might potentially one day get a tiny bit annoyed with it if I did it every single time and also ran over his childhood dog, Rush, on my way home from the store.

6 responses to “Plastic bag mysteries”

  1. plexxer says:

    Ah yes, the plastic grocery bags. They are annoying in both the fact that they typify opulent consumerism (I feel the same way about individually-wrapped cheese), and because it’s almost impossible to separate them when they are new. The baggers at the grocery stores also like to stick no more than 3 items per bag, and I always forget to take them with me whenever I return to the store and end up with 600 of them wrapped inside one another on my basement floor.

  2. Allison Kozdron says:

    I try to refuse plastic bags at the store too, but don’t always remember to bring my own bag, or it’s an unexpected trip to the store. Then I found a bag which folds up into a tiny pouch and is small and light enough to fit in my purse. Now, I can never forget it! I found it at ReusableBags.com which actually has lots of great info about the problems with plastic bags. Check out the bag here: http://www.reusablebags.com/store/acme-bags-workhorse-style-1500-p-1.html

  3. Denny says:

    Good tip, Allison. I just bought two of those bags. And http://www.reusablebags.com is a geat site.

  4. jack says:

    That’s super-bizarre. When I was a teenager, one of my first on-the-books jobs was bagging at the grocery store, where they drilled into us over and over that we should strive to fill each bag to it’s maximum, as much as it could be filled without it breaking.

    Maybe those bags got a lot cheaper in the intervening years. ::shrug::

    If you were confrontational types, you could have immediately removed the items from the bag, and dropped it back onto the cashier’s work surface. That would have been… uh, funny’s not the right word. Confrontational, I guess.

  5. jack says:

    Note: apropos of groceries, I inserted a “grocer’s apostrophe”, or at least an incorrect apostrophe, in that last comment. Feel free to think of that as a subtle joke rather than a grammatical error.

  6. Strong Bad says:

    Do you ever find the question “paper or plastic” irritating? Sometimes I’d just like to say “neither,” but the problem is I usually don’t do the grocery shopping and when I do stop on the way somewhere I’m not going to have a bag with me. I should probably keep one in the car. At least they could not give me a bag when I’m buying a stalk of celery, which is what I usually stop for. It comes in a protective bag to begin with, why do I need two?

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