h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In Germany they do not bag either in the supermarkets. Nor do they provide bags for you to do it yourself.

After 15 years of environment-awareness indoctrination I think this is a good thing. If I haven't got a bag with me, I have to pick one up _before_ the till and pay for it. You can get paper, plastic or cloth - adorned, of course, with the shop's logo.

These bags are sturdy enough to stand several runs to the supermarket.

Department stores bag your stuff for you at the till, but these bags are flimsier. (You can use them for a few times to the supermarket.)

They will ask you if you require a bag, which, given the system and general attitude to waste in Germany is a reasonable question and is awarded due consideration and an appropriate answer by the customer who - in my experience at least as a customer so far - would never get cross about being asked.

However, back to supermarkets:

The paradox is that there are signs all over the place asking you to leave your bags in the car (security). This is very annoying, because you have to pick up each item five times:

1. You take it off the shelf and put it in your trolley
2. You take it from the trolley and put it on the conveyor belt
3. After it has been passed over the scanner, you replace it in the trolley.
4. On returning to your car, you have to put it all in bags.
5. Once home, you have to take each item and put it away.

I go once a week and shop for the whole family on Saturdays, which produces a till slip some two feet long. So you can imagine how tedious the actual loading and unloading gets.

I wish someone would invent a system whereby, for example, you drive through the supermarket and take things from the shelf, scanning them as they go into the car. On the way out, you pay the amount scanned and reduce the first 4 items on that list to one single one.

[UK}

I tend to be carrying the shopping home and then it's heavy stuff on the back and squashables in plastic bags (which if I remember, I've brought with me). Sainsbury's round here still pack for you but I always ask to do it myself - that way it's packed how I like it and enables me to balance what I am carrying. When there are youth groups bag-packing, I usually say that because I have to carry everything I'd prefer to pack myself but have a conversation with the girl/boy about what they like about their youth group. I do generally give the group some money - mainly because I know what it's like to be bag-packing for charity (I'm a Guider) and it's not their fault I have strong preferences about how I pack for carrying stuff home.
[In the UK youth groups such as the Guides, Scouts, Boy's Brigade, St John Ambulance etc get permission from supermarkets to stand at the tills and pack customer's bags. It's entirely up to the customers whether they give any money to the charity or not. You get people with masses of shopping who stand there leaving the kids to do all the work (often moaning about how they're doing it or completely ignoring them) and give them nothing and people who tell the kids to get their hands of the shopping -as if they'll steal it. On the other hand you get little old ladies with 1 item who give them the contents of their purse and you're sure they can't afford it and people who ask for 10 pounds cashback and put it straight in the collecting bucket.]

When in a non-supermarket store, I usually have my backpack with me as well. Shop assistants tend to automatically reach for bags and I usually have to be on the ball to say "no bag, thanks" - usually with a smile and a "I prefer not to waste too much plastic" - the little bags you get at CD shops and the like are too little for many re-use purposes. I never object to a Lakeland Limited bag though, they last absolutely ages and take great weights easily.

Price Club/Costco does not provide bags. Nor do they ever, in my experience, have boxes of an appropriate size so carry your loot. They do have boxes, but they are generally oblong, and have been cut for use as display boxes which leaves them about 3" deep. In order to do your groceries there, you have to come propared with boxes or bags at the car. Nothing like freezing your a$$ off at -25 while bagging all your stuff. That is supposing you can find bag big enough for the gigantic boxes of cereal, loo paper, etc.

Anyone not familiar with Price Club/Costco should wather the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer goes to the Price Club on Long Island (why they chose that one instead of the one in New Rochelle which would have been closer, I am not sure, but there you are). He comes home with gigantic cans of Chili, Mustard, etc. Handy if you are feeding a family of 17 or running a restaurant, but not if you are a bachelor.

Wather???

"Anyone not familiar with Price Club/Costco should WATCH."

The cloth grocery bag that I picked up in a Berlin store 2 years ago is still absolutely fine for my weekly shop. I have slung it into the washing machine several times and it has still not frayed at the seams.

Our local Sainsburys has just introduced self checkouts (now theres trust!)... you scan, weigh, pack and pay for your goods all by yourself. Not a single shop assistant in sight, unless you press the "HELP" button.

B.

As opposed to the 'help yourself' button

Many of the wholefood shops I used to buy from in the UK had re-used supermarket bags donated by their customers, a few had their own printed bags. In the US, they'll offer you 5c off your bill if you use your own bag, or give you a card which they mark off each time and then give you a dollar off after a certain number of marks.

http://www.wholefoods.com (or 'Wholepaycheque' as it's known by many because of its prices ) is an Austin-based national chain of wholefood supermarkets, the like of which didn't exist in the UK last time I was there. Imagine a store the size of a large Sainsburys, Safeway, or Tesco, but with an emphahsis on good food, healthy food, natural food, organic food

And by way of coincidence, Wholefoods first store is pictured here (top right ) http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/company/history.html and is the very building from which I've recounted all of my stories, since it's now the CD store where I work (for two or three more weeks ).

Sorry to change subject from plastic bags...

We had a student phone up last week to renew her books because she had a cold (fair enough). She asked my colleague to speak up, louder, and louder and louder, because the cold had made her deaf in one ear. It took quite some persuading for her to change things so that she was holding her phone to the non-deaf ear!

Can you imagine... "I've got a cold, and it's made me deaf in one ear. And would you believe it, it's my telephone ear..."

Obviously, the cold also made her really, really stupid....

Many of the stores such as Loblaws and Loeb now have "do-it-yourself" checkouts. You do all the scanmning, all the bagging, and etc. If you get Romaine lettuce, you plunk it down on the scale, select "lettuce", it gives you the various lettuce varieties, you pick the one you have, press the screen, it weighs it, and you go on with the next item. They must have people who are checking to make sure you aren't putting Shitake mushrooms through as cafe mushrooms or something cheaper.

I haven't used these cashes, as I am agin' the whole idea of not having an actual person at the cash.

I like the human contact, and I don't like the idea of someone being put out of work because they can do away with the cashier.

I used the self-checkout once for novelty value, but sha'n't use it again for the very reasons you mention! Plus it's a bit freaky when a machine talks to you, or is that just me?

[ltp]
bags allways carry one when i go shopping

self servise checkouts never used one but believe should be as alternative not compulsion, which it soon will be if big retailers
continue to put cost before servise.

There is no substitute to human interface!

David B.,

How long have machines been talking to you????

I recently had a clear out of all the plastic bags in the flat (it is a small flat, and if I'[m not careful the bags take over) It was scary. So I ended up folding the good heavy-duty have to pay for bags for about 10 minutes, stashing the free bags into one bag and taking them for recycling.

I'm getting much better at remembering to take bags to the supermarket now I have a car - as all the good bags are returned to the boot after a shopping trip. I also invested in a wicker basket (to which one old lady commented she hadn't seen one since the sixties!) for heavy items, and can be seen on a regular basis skipping with it down Tesco's carpark.

However, in the clearout of all the thin and nasty plastic bags, I forgot to keep any for the bins! Silly billy!

Zantic

My mother is forever putting the bag of bags out for recycling and when I go into the one she has kept, it turns out to be a bag of little tiny ones from the pharmacy (that for some unknown reason smell mildewey), gigantic ones from IKEA that you could fit a small car in, or ones with ripped handles. It drives me nuts because I invariably discover this fact whilst trying to find a bag in a rush when I am going to miss the bus or be late for church.

I never accept the little pointless ones unless ther is no other option. To be honest, my handbag can probably handle anything that fits in those things!

The gigantic Ikea ones are very handy for the laundry...or storing winter duvets/blankets/clothing you know!

Don't blame yer maw fer yer ain bad planning Mudhooks!

Zantic

Well, I would have planned ahead to have a bag of bags....

Tonight, I came home to find that she had "opened" the big, brand new bag of cat food for me. It had already been opened and I had put a cup in it so it would be easy to dole out.

Unfortunately, she couldn't figure out the zip-lock that I had been so excited to find they have added to the bags. Despite the fact that I showed her exactly how to open the bag ("It isn't the Space-Shuttle, Mom. It is a zip-lock."), she sliced through the side of the bag just above the level of the food, rendering it impossible to close.

I told her that, for the next bag, the cat could stand to go hungry for two hours until I get home.

I still can't get over it..... zip-lock technology is beyond her grasp.

I have to be patient, I know. She is nearly 80 and we think she might be starting to have the first signs of Alzheimer's. It is so frustrating.... and I never know how much is memory and judgement impairment and how much is simply cack-handedness.

I try to count to 10 before saying anything.... I really do.

If she's starting to show some signs of alzheimers, you may have to cout to 100 before saying anything...


I normally take the canvas bags I made to the store with me, assuming I don't forget them, or haven't just made a last minute stop on the way home from somewhere else.

The store I usually shop at has recently installed one self service checkout.

I found out one time when I was in a hurry and not wanting to wait through the long lines at the manned checkouts that canvas bags and self checkouts simply don't work together.

I *thought* the self checkout would be relatively easy and quick like the ones I was used to using at BJ's (like Costco or Sam's). I normally use the self checkout at BJ's since their checkout help is interminally slow.

So... I put one canvas bag in the bagging area and the disembodied voice told me to remove all items from the bagging area - it's *so* sensitive to weight that it thought I was trying to bag something I hadn't scanned. A canvas bag only weighs maybe 4 ounces!

So I decided to simply bag the items directly back into the cart. It told me to put the scanned items in the bagging area because it didn't detect any weight in the bagging area.

I tried putting a few things in the bagging area but quickly ran out of room, so started to move them into the cart. It told me to put everything back in the bagging area because it noticed the weight changing.

While I was waiting for it to process the payment stuff for my order, I tried to start bagging things into the canvas bags which had to stay in my cart because they were heavier than the plastic bags. Silly me, I thought I might save a little time by doing that... so it told me to put everything back in the bagging area.

When it decided it was done taking my money and I could go, it told me repeatedly to take my groceries from the bagging area while I was trying to bag them.


I haven't tried to use the self checkout at that store since then.

Doesn't everyone have machines talk to them?

I'm afraid I just find lifts that 'speak' disturbing, and as for the speaking public convenience I once used Could there be anything more likely to freak you out?

Buy, yes, I do talk to the computer, the kettle, the ATM etc., I just don't like it when the odd one talks back!

As for automation of checkouts putting people out of a job - I can see the point. But there is still work to be done refilling shelves and maybe some more training and time could then go into customer advice instead.

The advantage of my system would certainly show on fresh veg and stuff (in Germany you weigh the veg in the veg department anyway, it is not weighed at the till). Just imagine what a lettuce looks like that has been handled 5 times, much better to just touch it the once.