A specter is haunting the Bay Area – it is the specter of the 10 cent grocery bag. All over cloudy NoCal, grocery stores, mini-marts, and corner bodegas are now required by law to make customers pay for their bags instead of giving them out like candy.
The most beautiful thing in the world.
I still haven’t ascertained whether the law also requires the snooty tone of the checkout people at the local hoity-toity foody grocery store when they surmise that you are bagless and ask “would you like to purchase a bag?” in a way that sounds suspiciously like “did you really vote Republican?”
It’s a funny turn of events. When my family moved to the States from then-Soviet Ukraine, my mother went on her first American grocery-buying expedition (Ralphs in Alhambra, stay classy) armed with my father’s briefcase. It had never occurred to her that American grocery stores would be so plentifully stocked with gossamer-thin plastic satchels.
Even years later, when we visited my family in now-independent Ukraine, plastic grocery bags were a hot commodity: people dressed in immaculate business attire walking down the streets of Kiev would be toting a briefcase or purse in one hand and a lumpen piece of polyethylene emblazoned with a Marlboro logo in the other. You had to be prepared in case you needed to pick something up on the way home, I guess, and even though bags were available (for purchase), they cost much more than 10 cents, adjusted for terrible post-Soviet economy.
I’m hoping someone, somewhere has already made the Godwin’s Law type analogy between this and socialism, but in case they haven’t, I’d like to declare my firstness openly and publicly. It’s totally socialism. First!1
There was a sendup of this in a recent episode of Portlandia – the show that I imagine was actually secretly cowritten by a bunch of cultural studies grad students in an effort to legitimize their PhD thesis on post-humor comedy. However, as a former resident of PDX pointed out, Portland has never actually managed to enact such a law. I guess it’s only fitting that the Bay Area would take something that’s in the realm of liberal absurdism and dutifully legislate it.
I do hope this policy will have the intended effect, curbing our over-reliance on wasteful convenience, much like taxing cigarettes has contributed significantly to the decline in smoking. But no small part of me resists this latest incursion of the nanny state in my ability to be unapologetically wasteful. It’s things like this that make me respect (okay, maybe respect is a strong word…) the ranting of the other half of red-blooded Americans, who hate any obviously engineered attempt to make them into better people. Capitalism creates waste, as we all know, but even Marx admitted that this process leads to creative destruction. We run out of wood, so we use coal; we exhaust coal (pun intended), so we turn to gas. Who’s to say that there isn’t some tipping point at which landfills choked with plastic won’t inspire some visionary to finally step up the game and invent that mythical biodegradable packaging material? I would personally like to see Sergei Brin turn his attention away from bionic eyewear and toward some cool ethereal shopping bag matrix – great opportunity for targeted advertising!
If I’m honest with myself, though, I guess what upsets me most about this new law is that I’m still constantly forgetting to bring bags, even when I remind myself to do so five times before leaving home to do the shopping. It’s just not a habit I’ve gotten into, and not one I imagine is going to be easy to instill in my busy, chaotic, unstructured Bay Area life. In the end, my excuse should be a familiar one to all those namby-pamby nanny state liberals: society made me do it!
Moral exhibitionism 