I think you have misread the article and that the outcome you think "should have been kind of obvious" is not what actually happened and in fact, could not have

I think you have misread the article and that the outcome you think "should have been kind of obvious" is not what actually happened and in fact, could not have happened in one of the two cases. You seem to think that people used more single-use plastic grocery bags after they were either banned outright, which could not have happened, or were made available for a fee, which you seem to want to attribute to stores having an incentive to increase the number of them that people used. But that's not what happened. After the grocery bags were banned or available for sale, people did not use more plastic grocery bags, but instead started buying more plastic trash bags. The supposition seems to be that people were previously re-using grocery bags for trash, but when they had fewer or no grocery bags available, they bought more plastic trash bags than they did before. Whether this is an improvement in any sense is a different question. My point is that your conception of what happened here and why seems completely wrong.