(This post is dedicated to my friend
Cederq who recently moved back to Oregon and came face to face with
having to pay 5 cents a bag when buying groceries. I feel for you
Cederq. I felt the same way.)
Here is a link to Cederq's post over at
the Busted Knuckles blog:
5 cents, 5 fucking cents….
I thought I would give the historical
context on how Oregon got there. From my own personal experience.
Sorry – I don't have time for finding links and exact dates. Just
going to give a rough timeline from my own memory – which is
sketchy at best.
Back in the day, when I was growing up,
when you went to the store, they bagged your groceries in brown paper
bags. It was just the way it was and no-body gave it much thought.
Somewhere around the late 70's –
early 80's – a bunch of wealthy tree-hugging environmentalists
moved to Oregon from California. They decided that paper bags were
bad because they needed to save the forests – even though Oregon is
85% timberland. So they introduced plastic bags. If they could have
at the time, they would have eliminated paper bag use altogether. But
there was still such a high demand for paper bags, that they had to
be content with the choice “paper or plastic.”
Early in the 21st century –
when virtue signaling was in it's infancy – those same
environmentalists noticed that all those plastic bags were starting
to pile up in landfills. So the paper bags were evil (save the
forests – SAVE THE EARTH) and plastic bags were evil (save the
landfills – SAVE THE EARTH!)
Enter the re-usable bag. Those were the
semi-cloth bags that folded like a paper bag but with handles and
bright colors on the outside. They were $1.50 or $2.00 each and
everybody who was anybody was using them. I began to smell a rat. I
definitely smelt a psy-op. I doubled down and refused to use
re-usable bags no matter how many dirty looks I got in the grocery
check out line. This went on for years.
January 1, 2020. I go to the grocery
store like usual. When I get up to pay – the checker informs me
that I will now be FORCED to buy re-usable bags because paper and
plastic bags were ILLEGAL!
WTF!
Yep – they had dubbed the usual
plastic bags as “single-use” (which was such a LIE because we all
re-used them) and that was somehow evil because they said so (saving
the planet doncha know). It was really and truly illegal now to use
them in the store. I was completely blindsided with the news and had
to buy four or five re-usable bags unless I wanted my groceries
rolling around all over the car. I was HIGHLY pissed off at the
stupidity of such a law.
All of a sudden, single-use plastic
bags were hard to come by. I hadn't realized how much I did re-use
them until I couldn't get them anymore. I remember an HR guy teasing
me about “contraband” because I had a couple stashed in my desk
drawer. I lamented the fact that I had just thrown a bunch away right
before that and they were now gone forever. Well, almost forever.
March 2020. Covid hits and insanity
ensues. Everything changed at the grocery stores. At first you
weren't required to wear a mask, then you were. Social distancing was
mandatory and there were stickers on the floors showing you how far
apart you could stand as you waited in line. There were big arrow
stickers on the floors showing you that the aisles were now one way
only.
(Side note: I didn't notice the arrows
at first. I was looking up at the shelf, trying to find a jar of
pickles. A woman covered head to toe and heavily masked started
screaming at me and pointing at the floor. Her husband – who was
not wearing a mask – was blocking my way forward. I was going the
wrong way. When I realized it was me she was screaming at, I got so
mad that I got right in her face and told her to F off. I was
surprised at myself. I had never done that before. I walked over to
the veggie department and told my husband that I had just told some
old biddy to F off. He just grinned and said, “That's my girl.”)
Overnight, reusable bags had become
toxic, super spreaders. If you touched it, ain't no way a checker was
going to touch it. It could be contagious. So now, you couldn't use
the reusable bags because of the possibility of cooties, but they
also couldn't go back to the “single use” bags – having just
run a highly successful campaign against them.
So they brought in these thick plastic
bags that were practically useless. They were too thick to be re-used
and were so badly designed that they sucked to even use for your
groceries. Everyone hated them. Just one more thing to stress
everyone out.
At the end of the day, they quietly
made it legal again to use paper or plastic “single use” bags at
the grocery stores. It was going to cost you 5 cents a bag now, which
may have been the plan all along. Oregonian's were now willing to pay
the 5 cents because they could have a tiny slice of normal back in
their lives and everyone could just stop talking about it already.
So, suck it up and pay the 5 cents,
because in Oregon, it LITERALLY could be worse. Take care out there
my friends. (LOL)