For a few months now I’ve been taking a pannier with me to the grocery store, as using the store’s disposable plastic bags is extremely wasteful. At the checkout lane there are little cards that you put in your basket that say you’ll be using your own bag so that the checkout lady (yes, always a lady) doesn’t give you any bags. I really only see about 5% of the people in the store with their own bags.

About 2/3rds of the time, the checkout lady would take the card out of my basket, scan my items, then give me bags, which I would then give back. Using the cards ended up being a pretty futile gesture. Some of this I can chalk up to her just forgetting, but sometimes it… wasn’t. For example, the best conversation I had went like this:

Lady: *puts bags in my basket after taking the ‘no bag’ card out of my basket*
Me: “It’s ok, I don’t need those. I put the ‘no bag’ card in my basket.”
Lady: “But that’s for people who have their own bag.”
Me: “I don’t need the bags. I have my own.”
Lady: ……
Me: *points to bag hanging from my shoulder* “I’m going to put them in this bag.”
Lady: …… *takes back bags*

So today I was happy to see that as of today the new prefecture-wide policy of having supermarkets charge three yen (about three cents) per bag has gone into effect. Now that previous number of 5% of people bringing their own bags suddenly flipped to about 95%. Apparently that three yen makes a huge, even surprising, difference in how much it’s worth for people to use their own bags.

Even better, where the old ‘no bag’ cards used to be, new ‘please give me a bag, I’ll pay for it’ cards are in their place. There shall be no more bags given when I explicitly ask for none!

Yeah, it’s not very exciting, but my life is made up of these small little victories, and other (hopefully) small little defeats.

Popularity: 37% [?]

Like it? Hate it? Either way, subscribe to the Lucky Isle RSS feed!