4 ms·
I remember the brown paper bag being an iconic part of American movies, when I was growing up. What happened to that?
by dachworker 3y ago
I remember the brown paper bag being an iconic part of American movies, when I was growing up. What happened to that?
- PaulHoule 3y agoI worked for a supermarket in the late 1980s and we were always trying to give people as few bags as possible because... the bags cost money and come out of our profits. We used to get a lot of requests for what we called a "Boston Bag" (this was New Hampshire) which was a large paper bag inside two plastic bags. The claim was that people who had to go up the stairs in apartments in Boston demanded this sort of bag.
- dionidium 3y agoI can carry one of those in each arm or maybe three total bags, if I balance it right. With the plastic ones I can get just about the whole trunk-load wrapped around my wrists and up the stairs in one go.
- nottorp 3y agoDon't your plastic bags have handles in the US?
- CuriouslyC 3y agoSeriously, when I was a young man in college I would ride back from the grocery store on my bike with about 50 pounds of groceries in double bagged plastic balanced on my handlebars. Life with only paper bags would have been very sad.
- jfengel 3y agoHere in Maryland they have returned. We got rid of the plastic bags and they brought in paper. I think grocery stores are required to charge ten cents. (Not fast food restaurants, though some entrepreneurial or confused franchise managers did try for a while.)
- mminer237 3y agoThey take much more energy/water/land to make, making them much more expensive. Traditionally they didn't have handles and weren't as strong as plastic either. Plastic bags are much better for the store and consumer, ignoring any externalities.
- Ferret7446 3y agoWe replaced them with plastic to be more environmentally friendly, as making paper requires a lot of resources/water not to mention cutting down trees. Yes, we just keep repeating history.