Up in Hartford, where not doing anything about property tax reform and balancing the budget for real has become an art form, they are discussing whether to ban the plastic bag. Needless to point out that Hartford is focusing on the the feel good–we’re saving the environment–spin instead of the economic impact of forcing small businesses like Chinese take aways, to buy more expensive bags. Economic impact studies are just so not part of the mindset of government in Connecticut.
Like all things, there are good plastic bags and bad plastic bags. I’m not fond of the grocery store plastic bag. Just think about the war that lowly plastic bag, emblazoned with the chain logo or smiley faces, has been fostering on society for all these years. When the grocery store plastic bag first arrived on the scene, there were people at the end of the checkout line who asked you the customer; paper or plastic? That was when grocery stores viewed you as customers that had choices. Because we had choices then, local grocers who even delivered! Back to the story though.
Your typical chain grocery store manager quickly figured out that paying someone to bag groceries was too costly. But I think it was because the lines that were clogging the checkouts were due to the bagger being unable to separate a plastic bag and open it. Things got so bad that they even stopped asking about paper or plastic because the baggers spent all their time trying to get the static cling sealed bags to open. Vast corporate training machinery was spent on the bagging issue to no avail.
The next move was to have the cashiers do the bagging operation because now all they had to do was swipe the bar code off an item instead of making up a price when the little tag was missing. Soon it was the cashiers wrestling with the bags, and the lines were still there, and corporate chain gorcery magnates wrestled with how to solve the problem. Instead of focusing on the bag, they decided that the problem was the cashier and unions, so they started putting in the self scanning checkout lanes where you the customer could scan the item yourself and then bag it. With the plastic bag. Or something like that.
The end result was that grocery store managers decided that customers should bag their own groceries because none of their employees could reliably open the plastic bags. You just know that grocery store managers are busy working out how they can get the customer to climb into the tractor trailer to pick out groceries instead of having employees do the costly step of stocking shelves, only to have customers remove items for purchase faster than their employees can get around to stocking them. Maybe there’s a plastic bag sealing up those tractor trailers.
The bags in the produce section aren’t better. They’ve been trying to solve that problem for years, switching spindles, sizes, placement etc. Yet the result is the same, you yank some plastic and get some rectangle clear plastic sheet with no clue as to what the top or bottom is. You try rubbing, peeling, even oxi-clean, and the bag remains elusive and unopened.
For some reason, we the customer, put up with this plastic bag plot to prevent us from carting away our stuff. We figured out that the plastic tape that bound CDs and DVDs in permanent sealed states was a bad thing. We just stopped buying the CDs and DVDs in stores and entire plastic tape industries crumbled. Not a legislator in sight on that one. Of course the music industry likes to blame the Internet and all those people who download music for free for the demise of the music industry’s mainstay CD sales. That’s why they’ve taken the unusual step of suing customers who download music. Meanwhile bands like Nine Inch Nails released their latest album for free and for sale on the Internet and made $750k in a day. Customers and markets will find themselves, it just takes time and innovation.
Maybe the grocery industry is working on a plastic bag free solution. There are signs, Whole Foods offers customers a rebate if they bring their own bags. For some reason they don’t extend this rebate for people who don’t use a bag at all, but then some policies are not designed to actually work, they just fill a need to seem like they are doing something. Which is essentially the role that Hartford legislators keep doing. They have no interest in actually looking at what regulations might be improved or eliminated to encourage innovation in grocery stores, or retail stores in general. They bemoan the high cost of living in the state, yet keep adding to the costs by suggesting regulations that raise the cost of doing business in Connecticut.
So they will talk about banning bottled water, and adding a bottle fee to plastic water bottles and now banning plastic bags. And the unfunded pension liability will just keep growing, eclipsing the revenues of the state at some point and our legislators will point to a fake surplus and all the environments they’ve saved. The economic environment, however, will continue to be ignored. Apparently its not important enough to be saved.
