The Giant grocery store at 7142 Arlington Road at Bethesda Row is ahead of the game, stocking self-checkout stations with paper bags days ahead of the Montgomery County Council plastic bag ban, which takes effect on January 1, 2026. You will also have to pay a 10-cent tax on each paper bag, half of which is paid to the business, and the other half goes into the County Water Quality Protection Fund. The bags at Giant are the retro kind, missing the convenient handles found on paper bags at Trader Joe's and Harris Teeter. You can thank the obscenely overpaid County Council, while struggling with your obscenely overpriced groceries. Heckuva job, Brownie!
Those crummy plastic bags the Council mandated we all embrace weren't an improvement on the fusty old low-tech paper bags they supplanted? Whodathunkit?
ReplyDelete"fusty"? Thanks grandpa.
DeleteI bought 1000 plastic grocery bags on Amazon for about $23 and stuck the box of them in my trunk. I will bring them in with me to the stores and lay them on the belt. Hopefully the clerks will stock them the same way they stock paper bags and not forget how to pack plastic bags!
ReplyDeleteI never pay for bags. Total and compete peaceful protest. Sorry. And I'm not alone in doing so. It's totally and completely punitive and as it is classified as a tax, it'll never be taken away. Whatever that revenue is earmarked for, it never actually makes it there. Scam tax. Thanks O'Malley! I look forward to my free paper bags at least at the Giant. All other places will be a pain in the butt.
ReplyDeleteAnother peeve of mine is the county would not take my recycle paper put out in a paper bag like this. But if I put the bag in the heavy hard to roll plastic pin -that they will pick up!
ReplyDelete