I usually bring my backpack or a duffel bag to purchase groceries or whatever, and the cashiers are absolutely uniformly grossed out by these bags. They will hardly touch them. They poke at a hem as if it were radioactive or something. Of course, this started around the time of the pandemic, when everyone was extra paranoid about germs. But it has not abated. Nobody will bag groceries into my personal bags, they just kind of shove it to the end and make me do it all myself.

I mean, you do know what those cashiers touch all day? Raw, unwashed produce, packages dripping liquids, boxes and cans that gathered dust on the shelf for 4 months, items that have been handled by N dozen customers and employees recently?

I suppose it's reasonable to treat a person's personal bag with suspicion, but I feel sort of insulted. Perhaps I'm not rational to be so insulted by this attitude, but they could at least pretend to be OK, for PR sake.

Then those people shall furnish single-use bags that are fit for purpose, rather than (1) forcing me to bring stuff from home (2) bagging my own stuff, when we pay bag boys to perform this skilled service for us. Fair enough?

This whole rigmarole is just another way for climate alarmists to shame the consumer and foist responsibility upon us to shell out for worthless bags that would otherwise be free. Face it, this is just another capitalist-fascist moneymaking scheme, and we're collateral damage.

In a not too distant past, grocery stores employed people who rang up our purchases and they also employed people who bagged groceries. These openings were beneficial to the job market. In fact, grocery stores have traditionally presented a lot of opportunity to people who are developmentally disabled, and I really appreciate that.

Now if groceries want to fire those cashiers and fire those bag boys and offload the labor onto the consumer, then I am sure they will be happy to pay us double wages and/or pass the cost savings on to us in the form of lower prices across the board. Unless they simply want to ramp up their paranoia, surveillance tracking, and accusations of shoplifting at the self-checkout, especially when we dare to use our own goddamn filthy bags, what do you think?

The report has been out for over 5 years. I think that's enough time for people to analyze it and point out specific methodological flaws, and we should not have to rely on "there's one methodological flaw so let's assume the whole report is wrong".

>The original article also notes that plastics industry groups jumped on the pandemic to write to regulators and grocers imploring them to ban re-usable shopping bags due to them being "virus-laden" cesspools. Which is not at all what the science suggests (we figured that one out pretty early in the pandemic as I recall).

1. when did this happen?

2. In 2022-2023 I was still seeing supermarkets with cart disinfection stations, and hand sanitizer dispensers sprinkled in every public space. Clearly plenty of people missed the memo.

I don't have an exact timeframe for when surface contact was determined to be a much lower risk vector, but I seem to recall that info coming out within the first few months (early to mid spring) after the virus hit the US. At the beginning of the pandemic people were quarantining all of their groceries and/or wiping every single package down with sterilizing solution. Then we learned that the virus is not terribly transmissible from surface contact, the major risk by far is via particulates, and basically everyone stopped doing that.

Of course basic hygiene is still encouraged. Sanitizing stations for carts is just a good idea in general, I hope that option never goes away. And given how bad the average person is at washing their hands on a consistent basis, I'll take the wide availability of hand sanitizer as a win for every single communicable disease (many of which are vastly more transmissible than Covid via surface contact). Like all Covid safety measures, at this point if bags freak you out then don't touch other people's bags.

I was more interested in when plastic manufacturers were lobbying businesses to ditch reusable bags. According to this new york times article[1], the CDC only acknowledged it over a year into the pandemic. If the lobbying efforts were within the period, they could have been forgiven for not keeping up with the latest scientific literature and using the official government recommendations.

>At the beginning of the pandemic people were quarantining all of their groceries and/or wiping every single package down with sterilizing solution. Then we learned that the virus is not terribly transmissible from surface contact, the major risk by far is via particulates, and basically everyone stopped doing that.

Did they stop doing that because they were keeping tabs on the scientific consensus, or did they simply get bored?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-hygien...