Hubby and I went grocery shopping at Walmart tonight. When we go. we like to bring with our multitude of reusable grocery bags. You know, the ones stores everywhere, including Walmart, are encouraging us to use.
We’ve collected a lot of these reusable bags and we bring the entire giant reusable bag full of them when we go grocery shopping to ensure that we have enough. Strangely, it’s very rare that a Walmart employee will use up all our bags. Instead, the opposite happens. Very few of them get used. And it happened again tonight.
Walmart employees have a tendency to pack as much as possible into a bag, rendering it almost impossible to lift. If we’ve got 15 items of canned goods, you can bet that all 15 will end up in the same bag.
The gal who checked us out tonight was working so hard at filling all the space in a bag that she looked like she was playing a game of Tetris. (That’s Hubby’s metaphor for what she was doing, but we both watched with incredulity as the bags kept getting fuller.) I had to ask her to remove the shampoo and body wash from the top of a full bag of groceries because I was afraid they’d break open and ruin everything in transit.
My theory about why Walmart employees overfill reusable bags is that they’re punishing us for using them because they fit so awkwardly on the bag carousels. Maybe, though, it’s simply because the bags appear to have so much structure that it’s tempting to keep putting stuff in.
I have these wonderful bags that I can keep in my purse. they fold up the size of a cell phone. I no longer have to worry about leaving my bags in my car, which was a regular bad habit of mine. I was in a story in the grocery store in Blackduck yesterday and layed the bag across my groceries as they were being checked out. When I went to pay, I noticed the boy packing my groceries had used plastic. “Why didn’t you use my bag?” I asked. “Oh, is that what that was?” he said. “I thought it was your scarf or something.” Have to admit, my bags are pretty decorative and I could indeed wear one around my neck if I wanted to.