Bags are no longer provided
Maybe I need longer arms. At least, if current tendencies continue, because the local merchants have decided that the bag is obsolete. No evolutionary timeline here; we were in four stores this evening. Three did not provide and we brought our own for the final stop. It’s a really odd sensation to carry a whole pile of small articles out of a huge box store, in your arms, across the Siberian sized parking lot to your car, trying not to drop anything that you’ve already paid for because there’s probably a clerk surreptitiously picking up after you and returning the article for resale. How else could they keep so much stuff in a place where delivery trucks are never sighted.
The bag thing is new, though. Box stores, in particular, have been compulsive about the providing several bags for every article you’ve bought. They used to pile up around the house, if you had any regular pattern to your commerce. Now that the bag isn’t even an option, we should expect to see some changes in our whole economic system. Perhaps, even, a reversionnge to the way things used to be.
Years ago, the cardboard box was the staple packaging for the “carry away” trade. Lots and lots of boxes, so many that when moving day arrived it took only a few minutes at any local market and you were ready to pack. And let’s not forget butcher paper. The basis of most school art, book covering, mud porch flooring; brown paper covered our universe. Then the plastics industry clued in, we managed to pollute most of the known world and we’re finally up to the present on the timeline.
I may have to start carrying one of those new utility bags wherever I go, in a state of preparedness for the purchase of the day.
