Perhaps you’ve never heard of Sten Gustaf Thulin. But you’ve likely been cursed by the product he’s credited with inventing.
Yes, Thulin was the Swedish engineer behind the plastic grocery bag in the early 1960s. And lest you think this is some commentary about those bags’ environmental effects, deleterious or beneficial, think again.
No, this is all about the totally impractical nature of these ubiquitous bags to haul your groceries home. For they are akin to attempting to haul water in a colander.
Once upon a long time ago, grocery store clerks bagged groceries in paper bags. They bagged quickly. They bagged efficiently. And their economy greatly reduced the number of bags required
That is, they tightly packed your groceries up to the rim, if not just slightly past, innately knowing what odd-sized item would fit with some normal-sized item and vice-versa and with remarkable speed.
Heavier items were on the bottom. Breakable/crushable items went on top or in their own bags. Raw meats never were packed with fresh fruit. Wet produce was not packed with greeting cards or magazines. Never, ever, was the precept of “one item, one bag” imposed.
A decade ago, Seattle Times writer Sandy Dunham referred to packing grocery store bags as bags being “built.” Thus, grocery bagging was every bit an art, a science, and, if you will, architecture. And a bag properly “built” could pretty much stand on its own rectangular bottom, a major plus for transporting all those groceries home.
But a sad thing has transpired with the proliferation of plastic grocery bags: It’s darn near impossible to “build” something that can’t “stand” on its own.
And fears over splitting lead to lots of plastic grocery bags with only a few items in each. One item per one bag is more the rule than the exception these days.
Surely, more plastic bags are used than the paper bags they save, it would seem. What a waste.
And if you think you can fix that problem by asking for plastic and paper, think again. Unschooled in once-standard and proper bagging techniques, too many baggers treat the double bags like their plastic-only brethren. It ends up being a double waste.
How maddening it is to have groceries rolling all over the trunk or truck bed or the back seats or on rear floors. Grocery stores might as well use a tractor front loader to dump your purchase into your vehicle.
So what’s a plastic grocery bag curmudgeon to do? Sans being allowed to roam the aisles in that tractor, and sans buying and repeatedly using my own paper grocery bags, I’ll keep asking for paper bags, already built into the cost of my groceries.
But I’ll also be asking the baggers to bag the way baggers once bagged and should still. If they won’t, I’ll bag ‘em myself.
And in that, albeit small, way, I’ll be doing my part to slay the curse of Sten Gustaf Thulin.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
