Saturday, August 6, 2022

The Great Oregon Bag Debacle – Pre-plandemic to the Present

(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)

2 comments:

Cederq said...

Thank you for that Wendy! This kind of schizophrenic level of thinking and activism is from retarded liberals and eco-terrorists and just plain dragged from the nose ring left leaning dummies. Will we survive them? Only if we can shoot them in year round open season. That is the only way to improve our lot. Communities in the past quietly got rid of their problem children and the rest of the community knew it and knew that was for the health and prosperity. Now, we celebrate them, emulate them and vote them into office...God help us!

wendyworn said...

Hahahaha! It is pure insanity. Plus all the produce we touched! What was really sad was when things started to relax and you didnt have to wear the mask in the store anymore, a woman and her daughter that were both wearing masks were ahead of me in line. the little girl was around 10-12 yrs old and was looking at me with absolute terror and kept pressing into her mom like somehow the fact that I was not wearing a mask was going to get her. I felt like here was a kid who was never going to learn to live in a maskless society. Just tragic.