Tags: Ecology, Society
I just work here
May 9th, 2007, by Rich.
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This is a true story. Two staff in a small convenience store are chatting as the queue I’m in slowly moves forward towards their dual tills:
Shopkeeper 1: These plastic bags get thinner and thinner!
Shopkeeper 2: Yeah.
The customer ahead of me approaches a free till carrying two items: milk, which is in a plastic bottle with an integral handle, and a box of chocolates, which are packaged in a small plastic wrapper. I watch both tills, wondering which will become free first and notice Shopkeeper 1 scan the milk and reach to place it in a plastic bag. The customer has just successfully carried the items to the till without using a basket and interjects cheerily:
Customer: No thanks!
As Shopkeeper 1 proceeds with the payment process the customer joins in the conversation about the plastic bags, obviously aware of the automatic “put everything in a bag” response that has just been avoided, and asks simply:
Customer: Why can’t they be made of paper?
Shopkeeper 1: ’cause they’d get wet with the milk, and besides, it probably costs too much.
The shopkeeper has a salient point, but not all sales are “wet” or cold (which promotes condensation), so a recycled paper product could possibly be used for all sales that are not attractors of moisture.
Customer: but what about the environmental cost?
Shopkeeper 1 (getting very defensive):Don’t ask me I just work here.
Customer: No, I’m not saying the policy of using plastic bags is your fault. I’m asking…
Shopkeeper 1: Look just leave me alone alright?!
Game over.
We’re bombarded with messages about our responsibility to society and the environment, and this reasonable series of questions was met with animosity. A discussion of the shop policy is now impossible because the shopkeeper obviously considers this an unjustified personal attack.
So where is the boundary is between “I just work here”, and “We just live here”? The shopkeeper has abdicated moral responsibility to their employer, but is failing to act as a channel for the concerns of the poor chap in front of me. The employer is driven by money, so if they’re not aware that their customers are concerned about plastic bag usage they’ll keep on using them and not offering an alternative: their staff will stay on autopilot, selling everything from newspapers to cigarettes with a complimentary piece of environmental vandalism.
There’s no such thing as moral abdication. The convenience store was wrong for not providing an ecological alternative, the shopkeeper was wrong for taking it personally and acting like a child, and everyone in the waiting line was wrong for not leaping to the customers defence.
May 9th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
I find that, when refusing a plastic bag which is really unnecessary, that to say “It’s OK, you save the cost of the bag, this is well enough packaged for me” works a treat…..but then perhaps I am a coward?
But I have to admit that I was very pleased yesterday that when I bought ’something’ to help my roses to survive a particularly virulent attack of greenfly (no amount of ladybirds could have coped!), I was very glad I had succumbed to the lure of the dreaded plastic bag, when the top of the ’something’ unscrewed itself in the boot of the car and I had to funnel it all back into the squirter before going on the rampage in the garden. The indestructible plastic bag had retained well over 75% of the noxious substance.
Now I’ll have to find a way to re-use it.
BTW in France they stopped supplying plastic bags over a year ago, and in Portugal, not the most ‘forward’ of countries, one might think (?), they were supplying re-usable linen bags instead of plastic back in 2001 when we lived there.