"Namby Pamby Day"

[Martin Phillp]

Went into town today and was quite surprised at how many people either bought their own bags or purchased the 'bag for life' 10p bags today, this included the likes of Wilko's and Aldi.

Those who didn't bring their own bags were happy to pay the 5p charge. Considering the lack of publicity up until this weekend, I was impressed at how Londoners have adapted on day 1.

[Philip Cobbold]

So, 4 years on *bump*

"Namby Pamby Day" hit England today, with the introduction of the 5p plastic bag surcharge. Obviously anything that will reduce environmental impact is a good idea, but my issue with it is the same as it was 4 years ago - no retailer has bothered seriously looking at replacing plastic bags with anything else, and so we are now in a situation where if you want something to carry your goods home in your options are either to plan ahead and take bags with you, or be forced into paying for more bags.

Ultimately, there was no incentive for the retailers to change - if any customers complain they can just blame it on the government and the big supermarkets are stage managing the situation by announcing that they will give all the proceeds to charity, thus cannot be accused of profiting from the situation.

The situation in England (which I don't know if different from anywhere else) has also been a bit complicated by the exemptions, one of which makes little sense, and the other no one seems to know about;

'Small Shops' are exempt, but this is not determined by the type of business or size of the premises, but instead by the total number of staff employed (a business with less than 250 staff is exempt). Thus a McColls has to charge for bags but an independent convenience store doesn't, even though they are exactly the same type of shop. It can get more ridiculous when you get to franchises - a Domino's store owned by a small franchisee with only 2 or 3 stores can still supply bags for free whilst one owned by a larger franchisee must charge even though both have the same brand on the high street. This seems a very odd way to go about making exemptions.

The other exemption is that where you are buying raw meat, fish or poultry the retailer is still permitted to supply a bag free of charge. I made a point of asking around today at a number of shops (including big supermarkets) and none of them seemed aware of this.

I do also wonder how far enforcement of the 'bag tax' will go. Will we actually see cases of someone accidentally pulling an extra bag off a self scan checkout being prosecuted for bag theft, a supermarket employee being dismissed for double-bagging and not charging for the second bag, or a supermarket itself turning a blind eye to this and being prosecuted for willful supply of carrier bags?

As I said 4 years ago, whilst the environmental argument is sound I am amazed that time has even been spent on this when there are far more serious and pressing matters going on in the world.

The raw meat, fish or poultry has to be unwrapped to qualify for a free bag. So anything that you'd buy from a meat or fish counter in a supermarket would qualify, and the bag that the person working on the counter wraps the product in is the free bag. Anything that you pick up in a main aisle is prepackaged, and so doesn't qualify for a free bag.

[bilky asko]

As I said 4 years ago, whilst the environmental argument is sound I am amazed that time has even been spent on this when there are far more serious and pressing matters going on in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_o ... _privation

[stu]

What happened to those blue and orange Sainsbury's plastic baskets that they wanted you to use instead of bags? Presumably you buy them and you'd see all the posh people use them in their cars full of shopping in the late 90s

[bilky asko]

What happened to those blue and orange Sainsbury's plastic baskets that they wanted you to use instead of bags? Presumably you buy them and you'd see all the posh people use them in their cars full of shopping in the late 90s

They're storing stuff in our attic, along with the green Safeway boxes.

[WillPS]

They were called Smart Boxes. There was still a few kicking about in the store I worked in in 2008. They had the old (pre-1999) branding, although in fairness so did a good amount of the ambient food packaging then. I suspect it was a case of they didn't sell well, took up loads of space - so were removed from the shop floor, where obviously they never sold.

I think the idea worked really well in Fast Track stores - but loading them up, only to have to unload/reload at the checkout spoilt the point, for me at least.

I think Waitrose tried something similar, along with Safeway.

[cwathen]

They were called Smart Boxes. There was still a few kicking about in the store I worked in in 2008. They had the old (pre-1999) branding, although in fairness so did a good amount of the ambient food packaging then. I suspect it was a case of they didn't sell well, took up loads of space - so were removed from the shop floor, where obviously they never sold.

I think the idea worked really well in Fast Track stores - but loading them up, only to have to unload/reload at the checkout spoilt the point, for me at least.

I think Waitrose tried something similar, along with Safeway.

The other issue with boxes is how convenient were they once you got home? You can easily carry 6 bags of shopping from a car a short distance to your door but you can only carry 1 box at a time.

So - Safeway's 'shop & go' / green box system. The problem with it fundamentally was that the technology was nowhere near ready to realise the idea. The lack of any way of verifying the accuracy of what the customer had scanned meant the only way to prevent theft was the threat of random rescans.

There didn't even seem to be any sort of trust rating built up where if your shopping was found to be correct then you were less likely to be asked in future - it just seemed to be either 'every nth customer gets rescanned' or truly at random. When there was no way of knowing whether or not you would be rescanned this destroyed the fundamental selling point of the system - that you could rush in, do a week's shopping and bugger off quickly without worry about having to wait for the checkout.

This system also pre dated any sort of self service payment, IIRC the system would spit out a receipt which required you to attend a manned payment point to pay even if you didn't need rescanning. The company then had to choose between well-staffing these to keep the dream of 'shop & go' alive but be stuck paying people to sit around not doing much, or staff them more economically which then leaves customers queuing to pay.

On top of all of that, in some smaller stores existing conventional checkouts were pulled out to create space for Shop & Go, leaving those who didn't want to use it and/or had given up on it having to wait longer for fewer checkouts.

All in all, it was a good idea in concept but given the obvious problems with it in operation I'm surprised they rolled this out as extensively as they did, and continued doing so for so long, it was still being fitted into new stores as late as 2002/03.

[jonathan]

They were called Smart Boxes. There was still a few kicking about in the store I worked in in 2008. They had the old (pre-1999) branding, although in fairness so did a good amount of the ambient food packaging then. I suspect it was a case of they didn't sell well, took up loads of space - so were removed from the shop floor, where obviously they never sold.

I think the idea worked really well in Fast Track stores - but loading them up, only to have to unload/reload at the checkout spoilt the point, for me at least.

I think Waitrose tried something similar, along with Safeway.

And some of it still did until fairly recently before being updated to by Sainsbury's!

[TG]

Anything that you pick up in a main aisle is prepackaged, and so doesn't qualify for a free bag.

That's apart from tesco.com, where we put all raw meat, prepackaged or not, in one of the new free red bags. Also (at my store anyway) shower gels, washing liquids and bleaches (although that only started three days in).

[tillyoshea]

So I found myself without a bag in Boots today, so bought one. I get Boots Contact Lenses, which means I get a discount on Boots-brand products, but was surprised to see that the till applied this to the carrier bag, meaning I was charged 4p rather than 5p.

Would this sort of discount be permissable under the legislation? Or is this just an error?

[Martin Phillp]

Tesco have sensibly put the carrier bags back on the racks of the self-checkouts at my local Extra, while the Express has taken them off!