Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

« KeepaliveMainRotis Sans »

Plastic Bags

397 words

In the paper this morning there was an article on free plastic carrier bags stopping to exist in South Africa. The topic of plastic bags is an interesting one.

To begin with, the world of free plastic bags has ended ages ago in Germany. You are strongly encouraged to bring your own rucksack, box or bag or you'll have to fork out 10 to 30 cents for each plastic bag you take. While remembering to take your own bags with you may be a bit annoying, this does make a lot of sense and probably saves the environment quite a bit of waste. This leads to Germans frequently running around with bags made of cloth. If you spot someone carrying that kind of bag, they're usually German...

I even saw change in that direction while living in England. The big supermarkets would offer large, higher quality 'bags for life' for 10 pence or so, encouraging you to re-use them and actually giving you a new one in exchange for a broken old one. For me they lasted about a year before they broke. While supermarkets would still let you have cheap plastic bags for free, Sainsbury's would give you back a penny for each of your own bags you used. Originally that penny was supposed to go to charity, but by integrating it into their cashier system, they ruined that aspect. Anyway, it's an incentive to re-use bags.

But let me go back to South Africa. Apart from having free cheap bags there, they also have two people at each checkout, one of which will pack your bags for you. I first saw that in South African supermarkets in the 1980s and have associated this kind of mindless low-earning and mostly superfluous job with the kind of decadence you could only afford in an unjust régime like apartheid ever since I understood the concept of apartheid and why it was a bad thing.

With this background, I was obviously shocked when I saw people packing the goods into bags for me during my visit to California in 2000 (I hadn't noticed this when I was there in 1993, by the way). To make things worse, people start musing about this kind of jobs in Europe now as well. Thus, what once was a sign of of an unjust régime, now is a sign of well-greased capitalism.

June 16, 2003, 22:44

Comments

Comment by brian w: User icon

Funny, I always associated “bag boys” with an idyllic kind of 1950s America. It’s one of those first jobs kids would get, like delivering a newspaper or something.

June 16, 2003, 23:37

Comment by Sondar: User icon

Uh, maybe it’s not just “the kind of decadence you could only afford in an unjust régime like apartheid” I’ve never heard apartheid being described as ‘decadent’ before, and besides, if it was a decadence that could only be afforded under that system, why hasn’t it disappeared now. Maybe in a country with such high employment, any job (though I will concede it is mindless, low-earning and pretty superflous) is worth having. Did you have to pump your own petrol in South Africa? No, as by law this has to be done by an employee of the petrol station. These jobs are quite unnecessary, but exist to limit unemployment.

December 3, 2003, 15:45

Comment by shaun: User icon

i think its good

October 16, 2005, 17:07

Add your comment

« KeepaliveMainRotis Sans »

Comments on

Photos

Categories

Me

This page

Out & About

pinboard Links

People

Ego-Linking