Dear americans, explain yourselfs on your supposed use of bags.

As a former sacker back in my teen days I must say... Suck it you paper loving loosers. They are slower to pack and they look stronger but if you have frozen food or something like that the condinsation will get the bag wet and cause it to break. The ones they had at Tom Thumb(owned by safeway) used to have handles inside them. Plastic is still king here but some of the more tree hugger stores push the reusable bags.
 
My plastic bags never rip on me... I must be a wizard.
Plastic bags can actually take lot of strain. Grocery store plastic bag won't rip even if you fill it with heavy stuff, because they are designed to withstand the weight of a bag full of groceries.

The reason why movies and stock photos have people carrying paper bags in their arms without using the handles is simple, it looks nicer. Dragging a plastic bag looks ugly, even though it's practical.
 
When I was going to college this town I went through had a paper plant that made paper bags. It was the only town I knew of that would ask you if you wanted paper or plastic. I would go with paper because it was new for me.

Another thing about pictures of people with bags in there hands, when I buy vegetables I put them in a plastic bag so they won't get meat juice on them. These pictures never have that.
 
My Mrs. has reusable Hemp bags, supplied by ASDA a subsidiary of WalMart.

And for the hard of understanding - yes you can smoke them, but no you would not get any sort of buzz as they contain no 'active' ingredient what so ever. The plant is related but is not the same as Indian Hemp - the one with the good stuff.

You get a discount (OK its only a penny a time) every time you use the bags.
 
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My Mrs. has reusable Hemp bags, supplied by ASDA a subsidiary of WalMart.

And for the hard of understanding - yes you can smoke them, but no you would not get any sort of buzz as they contain no 'active' ingredient what so ever. The plant is related but is not the same as Indian Hemp - the one with the good stuff.

You get a discount (OK its only a penny a time) every time you use the bags.

I see you missed the weed smokers thread. I don't think very many people here are ignorant about the difference between hemp and weed.
 

These are the best I think, but we have to pay for them. The South Australia state government banned plastic bags in May 2009 and forced us to use either heavy biodegradeable plastic bags (the sort you get at big department stores such as Myer), or these reuseable cloth bags shown in the pic. I like them because they're easy to use at the self serve checkout at Woolworths, and carrying them loaded from the car to the kitchen. Unfortunately they cost $1 each. The heavy plastic bags cost 25c each and the supermarket plastic bags cost 10c. It's a sham, basically.
 
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Plastic bags are awesome for general trash bags around the house/in your car. Fill it up, tie it up, and throw it out.
 
Yeah I don't even buy garbage bags anymore, it's all the plastic bags I get at the store...
I remember not 20 years ago when I went grocery shopping to the local store (not the huge Wal-mart type of thing we all go to now) and she had a bag of hard plastic fiber of some sort that she used every time, and when she knew the shopping was gonna get heavy, she used one of these:
violraviol-changuitos-3.jpg


Nobody walks anymore and everything is disposable so...
 
Paper bags are in the past. Hollywood at it again.... where I live (as everyone else has chimed in) use plastic. The only use for a paper bag is for alcohol.
 
Man fuck yo bags

stock-photo-indian-lady-carrying-basket-from-rajasthan-43678261.jpg


Dis is how da gangsta mothafuckas roll.
 
Not everyone is cool enough for headbaskets
 
When checking out, the cashier will usually ask you "paper or plastic?". They prefer plastic bags because it's cheaper for them. They're starting to phase them out for environmental reasons though, switching back to paper or trying to sell you a reusable bag (you save 5 cents or something if you bring a reusable bag).
Ah, so the bags are free? That's an explanation I guess. We have to pay for our bags, except for clothes or shoes or electronics. A biodegradeable plastic bag at Systembolaget is 2 SEK, COOP charges about the same for a enormous paper bag that will never break that narf mentioned.

I don't mind that, what I hate about Aldi is how lazy the checkout operators are. They get paid more than any other supermarket, yet all they do is sit on their arse and push things over the scanner, and expect you to put it into bags yourself.
They should bag the contents too? You're spoiled! Insert dealwithit.gif here :p

I find some checkouts most bizarre. This Tesco's for example has the smallest imaginable tray for the customer to pick up his items!

https://pic.armedcats.net/k/kn/knarkas/2010/12/27/article-1185081-050708EF000005DC-740_634x387_popup.jpg

Look at that! It can hardly fit more than two milk cartons.
 
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I'm not American but I am old enough to remember paper bags with no handles in Australia.


We've been on that road since the 1970's. Now we're one step ahead. Supermarkets are currently testing a new generation of "plastic" bag made from potato starch, which can actually be composted. They're more expensive to make but it seems people are willing to pay more for them.

Currently testing? They introduced "biodegradable" plastic bags decades ago in Oz. mind you, we left some out in the elements for months when we were kids and they didn't seem too affected, yet it was claimed they were supposed to start breaking down within 10 days. No, they do become brittle and weak... eventually.
 
I find some checkouts most bizarre. This Tesco's for example has the smallest imaginable tray for the customer to pick up his items!

*Snip*

Look at that! It can hardly fit more than two milk cartons.

They have the same crap at Lidl, you are supposed to put your shit back in the trolley and pack it in the bags somewhere else...
 
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German efficiency.

Aldi checkouts are massively faster than in any other market. Typically, they have a 30x30cm space behind the scanner for temporary storage, but there is no ridge at the end. As a result, the clerk keeps pushing the products further, forcing you to quickly shove them back into your cart. Even during the busiest times they manage with two cash registers operating while similarly busy other markets would run 4-5. The queues appear to be long, but they move quickly.
 
They have the same crap at Lidl, you are supposed to put your shit back in the trolley and pack it in the bags somewhere else...

Here Lidl changed those things to normal checkouts.

Another fun thing in Lidl is that the conveyer going in is 200 meters long, but it moves at Mach 1. :lol:
 
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I've used re-usable cloth bags for as long as I can remember.

What really pisses me off is the self-checkout systems. They're nice, I like to avoid having my bags packed by surly teenagers who are highly likely to break eggs or squeeze bread, but the checkout uses a weight-based system to make sure only what you buy goes into your bag.

These scales are so sensitive that a couple of cloth bags will, in fact, set off the "unexpected item in the bagging area" system, and force the poor sap who's in charge of the self-checkouts to punch in her key-code and verify that I'm not attempting Grand Theft Produce. I've been to self-checkouts that have a button to re-zero the scale after you've put your bags on the thing, but the local ones don't have it yet.
 
Our Aldis have huge belts as well, the point is to ensure that the customers can load it up in parallel while the cashier storms through the products. Weirdly, I never go to Lidl so I can't compare.
 
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