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.
DeleteSo those County Council geniuses
DeleteCame up with the brilliant solution
To replace plastic with paper bags
And cut down trees to end pollution.
I 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!
ReplyDelete10:07 - Reusable bags are $2 each. Fools and their money are soon parted.
DeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteSo why not bring your own reusable bags instead of blatantly stealing Giant paper bags? You think these bags grow on trees? No, wait, they do, but somebody has to pay to manufacture, shop and stock these. Grow up JAC, and act like a responsible citizen.
DeleteAren't they going to charge 10cents per paper bag?
DeleteI used to work in the paper making biz, making paper, particularly thicker and heavier kraft paper is achemical, energy using, odoriferous and nasty business. I've read that a very small amount of corn starch in the plastic bags allows them to breakdown. I hope we're not jumping back out of the fire into the original pan.
JAC, stealing paper bags is not a "peaceful protest." It's simply ("total and complete") stealing.
DeleteDon't keep being what Bugs Bunny called "a maroon."
As Sammy Davis, Jr. (he did! look it up!) *almost* sang, in the theme song of "Baretta," "If you've got the dime, Don't do the crime!"
Delete@1:03PM I visited a friend in Jacksonville FLA 1989, and concur about the distinct pulp plant smell around town.
DeleteAnother 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!
ReplyDeletemake that "plastic bin"....
Delete12:08 - Best to keep to the topic and leave off any unpleasant jabs, it makes your position look weak. Increasing this absurd tax to .10 per bag is really beyond the pale. What they should have done long before they rammed thru this bag tax is simply switched to paper which has already been recycled at least once. We had paper bags when we were kids. What's wrong with a bag? Nothing years ago, when discussed before the tax and clearly not now. The citizenry would have adjusted to the paper but leave us alone on the fee. Larry Hogan was right, the Dems in MD never met a tax they didn't like.
ReplyDeleteBest to keep on topic after someone brags about stealing as some absurd form of protest. Like I said, buy a stack of reusable grocery bags from Trader Joe’s, and you don’t have to complain about being taxed or charged for paper or plastic bags. Those TJ bags last for decades, and are easily rinsed out with a bit of dish soap to keep them and the planet clean.
DeleteI am old enough to remember when Giant Food began encouraging use of plastic bags in the late 80s because they could collect them for recycling.
ReplyDelete1:40 - How interesting. Your post reminded me that I haven't seen the plastic bag recycle bins outside grocery stores anymore. Hmm.
DeleteNow we all know Montgomery County wasn’t going to allow itself to be UPSTAGED by PG County, Baltimore City, and 3 Counties surrounding Baltimore City. They couldn’t handle other jurisdictions beating them to their Environmental Wonderland !
ReplyDeleteMake that Neverland!
DeleteLike BITD with no handles before Freshfields took over the area, when you had to schlep bags arms around pulled close to your waist before loading up the Vista Cruiser or station wagon! As Archie & Edith sang: "Those were the days!!"
ReplyDelete2:54 - First of all, that's not theft. Secondly, many do it even though they don't admit it. I'm more of a decent citizen than most. You're welcome.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of the Giant, Robert (& others), who is sick and tired of walking over all the filthy nasty EGG YOKES smeared all over the sidewalks between leaving the library bricks to to slate/flagstone shortcut to the parking lot of said Giant?!
ReplyDelete