On Friday I shopped at the IKEA for the first time in ages, and I had to pay five cents for a plastic bag. How cool is that? I usually carry a cloth shopping bag around with me (it packs up really small — a fabulous gift from my pal RheostaticsFan), but for some reason I’d left it at home. I was buying four small vases as thank-you gifts for my kids’ teachers so I had to have a bag, so I forked out the five cents. No bitterness, though, only appreciation that IKEA is taking a small step to reduce bag use, especially since you can buy reuseable cloth bags there now instead, as well.

Today at the Superstore I had a different adventure in bagging. It seems they have stopped having the cashier bag your groceries for you. Instead she just piles them up in a big hot mess at the end of the cash and you have to sort it all out yourself.

I’m sure that this is a cost-saving measure of some sort because discount grocery stores, like Price Chopper or No Frills, always have bag-your-own. But I really do not understand the business model here. First of all, since I had no idea what I was doing and was faced with a huge pile of unsorted groceries, it took me FOREVER to get stuff into bags…eventually the cashier got tired of waiting around for me to finish and started to help out so the three other people behind me in line would stop glaring at her. It was definitely much, much slower moving people through the line, which says to me that they will soon have to have more cashiers on each shift. Secondly, it’s not like they are saving money by eliminating a bag-boy position, as the cashiers there used to do all the bagging themselves anyway. And lastly, since I have no bagging skills and my groceries were all heaped together I did a terrible job of optimizing, which meant that I used way more plastic bags (which are still free…for now) than I would have otherwise. When the cashiers bag my stuff, they can fill my cloth bags so full that I can barely lift them, whereas I was able to get like, three things in there before they were topped out. So again, increased cost for the Superstore in terms of more bags being used, and plus crappier for the environment.

PLUS, there does not seem to be any way to use your reuseable cloth bags in the self-checkout line. I’ve never seen anyone doing it, and trying to put your cloth bags on the “NO CHEATING” scale causes an error for me. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but in the meantime I’ll just be over here being bitter.

So, to sum up, I am NOT AMUSED, Superstore. It seems like every time we go there I have a new bitch about them. They are very close to being put on notice.

In more positive news, however, remember this post I made a few months ago complaining that the cart return at the Superstore was a million miles out into the parking lot, rendering the concepts of “handicapped” and “maternity” parking meaningless? They moved one of the cart returns up next to the preferred parking!

Clearly, they did some serious thinking on the issue. I am pleased.

For now.