The bagging is done on a counter or conveyer belt by laying your bag down and then packing it. That surface isn't sanitized before the next customers' food items and/or bag touches the exact same surface.

Also note how the vast majority of reusable bags get transported: We compress them down with our hands and stuff them somewhere. Your hands have been all over the bags (unlike most parts of your jacket).

Maybe researchers will determine that it isn't a risky practice after all, but given that we don't know yet it seems like a perfectly reasonable precaution.

Not everyone is out to get you. The ban is not senseless, and the stores implementing it are not being unreasonable. Have you considered the possibility that maybe you're the one being unreasonable?

Considering the other stores near me having implemented this, I don't think I'm the one being unreasonable. Meanwhile the same store still has employees offering to bag groceries for people, which means two employees standing near you and touching your food instead of one. If these measures were anything other than theatre pandering to the fearful, they'd stop offering to bag groceries for people. And for that matter, they'd get rid of the guy standing at the door too, or put him behind some plexiglass and have him signal people with semaphores or something. As it is, they have everybody shopping there walking next to the door guy for no good reason.

> Not everyone is out to get you.

Obviously they're not "out to get me", but I appreciate the subtle insinuation that I'm the one who's paranoid.

I have no experience with the stores in your area or what they do or don't do. I was commenting on the bagging policy.

Do you have any on-topic arguments for why the bagging policy is unreasonable?

The bagging policy is ridiculous because it has about as much to do with safety as the TSA. It's theatre. That it's theatre is apparent from the fact that the store isn't operating with a skeleton crew (which would be a meaningful distancing measure.) If they haven't bothered to minimize the number of employees in close proximity to customers, why should I believe any of their other measures are rationally motivated?

Even if you think that context isn't relevant, the premise of covid spread through surface contamination is still dubious. And even if that risk were credible, I assert that banning reusable bags would still be a dubious measure. Instead of using a grocery bag touched only by myself, they'd have me using grocery bags that have been touched by employees. Employees who've also touched my food, which I touched before them. Food which was probably touched by other customers before me. If surface contamination is a serious concern, the entire premise of a self-service grocery store is fucked and they should stop letting customers inside the store (self-service grocery stores are a 20th century invention; alternative schemes exist. Notably, self-service grocery stores weren't common until years after the Spanish Flu...) Since they haven't done that, it's impossible for me to take their bag ban seriously.

Unlike clothing, bags touch a lot more things, and being textile means that contaminants are easily absorbed and more difficult to remove. That's the argument I've heard, in any case.