Lileks: And Our New National Bagging Champion Is ….
20th February 2012
I’ll bet you didn’t know that there were National Bagging Championships. (For some of you: I’ll bet you didn’t know that in certain backwaters of Flyover Country there are still kids that bag your groceries.)
The bagging issue might be familiar to Strib readers; a story this week noted that Target is pushing plastic over paper, and some people don’t like it. Agreed: Plastic makes you feel cheap, somehow. Soviet. I am carryink goods from People’s State Sustenance Node No. 23 in glorious People’s Sack.
When done with them, some people also feel guilty throwing them away. So they get shoved into the Plastic Bag Full of Smaller Plastic Bags, which eventually becomes the size of a beanbag chair; then you take it to the store and put it in the Really Big Plastic Bag for Holding Smaller Plastic Bags Filled with Even Smaller Plastic Bags, and this absolves you of all sin and guilt.
We’d like to think they’re compressed into incredibly dense cubes and used as building materials in poor countries, but for all we know they take them out behind the store, douse them with gasoline and torch them.
Of course, the truly enviro-conscious have reusable totes, even if they do accumulate so much grot and bacteria they’re like a Shake ‘n’ Bake bag for salmonella.
February 20th, 2012 at 15:22
As a matter of fact, I visited my hometown of Elkhart, IN, recently and was astonished and nonplussed when a kid not only bagged my groceries, but took them to my car!
Rather like having someone else pump my gas for me–I wouldn’t know how to react.
February 21st, 2012 at 12:29
Obviously, he recognized you as a geezer.