Would You Pay For Your Grocery Bags?
Last week I went to Washington, D.C., with my wife and mother-in-law. As a political science major and later law school graduate, surprisingly I’d never been to our nation’s capital. I had a wonderful time, and hopefully came up with a few blog posts about my trip.
Waiting In Line
There’s no getting around it — when you go to Washington, D.C., you’re going to wait in lots of lines for tickets to enter museums and tours. On the last day of our trip, I was in line at 9:00am to see the Holocaust Museum, which opened at 10:00am. We were cold and hungry, and luckily there is a cafeteria next to the museum, so I went inside to grab some coffee and bagels while my wife held our place in line.
You Want Me To Pay For A Paper Bag?
After getting two coffees, a bagel, a doughnut, and a cookie (I know, I know.. not the healthiest food to eat when you’re out of town!), I realized I needed a bag to carry all that stuff outside. When I asked the clerk, she said she had to charge me 5 cents for a paper bag. Seeing the perplexed look on my face, she further explained that D.C. had become the first American city to institute a bag fee. The effort would help reduce waste, and the money collected by the fee would go to help clean up the nearby Anacostia River.
Rationally Irrational Behavior
Instinctively, I declined to pay for a paper bag. Why on Earth would I pay extra for it? But once I realized I couldn’t physically carry two burning hot coffees with sketchy lids plus our snacks, I decided to have a moment of clarity and decided to drop a nickel on a paper bag.
Behavioral Economics
It is funny how even the smallest monetary charge deters us from a purchase. Reports have D.C.’s plastic bag consumption down 60%! This means people have gone with reusable grocery bags or just try to carry their groceries out by hand. Of course, it also can have negative economic consequences — there are some people who have chosen to pick up groceries in nearby Virginia or Maryland, with possible higher sales taxes, just to avoid paying 5 cents for a bag!
I find it fascinating that the deterrence has nothing to do with the amount of the charge, but in confronting citizens and forcing them to choose to accept an additional 5 cents/bag on each transaction. Similarly, we are manipulated when we use plastic over cold, hard cash. Plastic is painless to swipe, but cash is more of a physical & mental transaction, and you are likely to spend less money when using cash.
Point is, we are all human beings, and subject to subtle manipulation in our financial habits, which have an effect on our lives in different ways. If this new bag tax doesn’t affect D.C.’s economy, I think it was a great way for the District to promote conservation & recycling. Of course, it’s a bit IF, so we’ll see how it shakes down.
What about you — would you pay 5 cents per bag? Are there other instances of ‘behavioral economics’ where you are encouraged/manipulated into making certain financial choices?
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Washington state is going the same way and honestly for me I don’t even notice it. My wife does her best to use reusable bags but at this point we have a collection of about 20 of them and we’ve spent way more for those bags then a years worth of nickel sacks. It’s sparked outrage in our area but honestly I haven’t sweated this one much myself. The old ‘behavioral economics’ has got me many times. Buy 5 get 2 free or pretty much anything at Costco I’ve fallen prey to. But when you reach a point where you’re actually controlling your money at least for me it’s not as much as an issue.
@Paul @ FiscalGeek Paul, great point – I think the more aware you are of your money, the easier it is to control the manipulation. I can’t tell you what I buy in Costco, but every time I go there, I spend $200 LOL! So for me, I try to avoid Costco unless I’m going there for a specific purchase. I’m trying to set parameters where I know my natural tendencies won’t help me out.
It’s also worth noting that governments use tax policy all the time as forms of manipulation. “Sin” taxes to reduce smoking, mortgage deduction to encourage home ownership, etc. This bag tax is certainly nothing new; I just find it a very interesting use or conservation/environmental use.
Hey,
We’ve implemented the same thing here in Ontario Canada, but I think it’s a little less restrictive. I believe the 5 cent fee per bag is only effective in the grocery stores. We’re fortunate though as it’s literally in our back yard and can take a few trips a week purchasing smaller amounts at a time. We use the cloth bags, and sometimes the store has boxes available for free.
Interesting it’s coming down to this, but I know it’s definitely reduced the amount of plastic bags we use.
Oh, we have purchased bags at 5cents each, but maybe only a dozen since the law came into effect about a year ago.
Cheers,
Guy
Guy, thanks for giving us the scoop from north of the border! I imagine more U.S. cities will follow suit, and reusable bags will become the norm. Habits have to change first, and that takes time.
Here in the Detroit area they begain charging 5 cents per bag and people began to get upset. Now they just have the cost built in and don’t include the line item on the bill. They do however provide a 5 cent credit to every reusable bag that is used. I wrote about some saving in a recent Friday Frugal Tip http://bit.ly/d52Mt8
The bag charging scheme is happening up here too; however, it’s made the automated checkout lanes far less efficient as they no longer automatically provide bags; you have to collect the bags after scanning every single item so it takes another 5 minutes to bag everything.
Yeah I can see how that would be annoying and counterproductive to the whole reason you use a self-checkout lane! I wonder if stores will begin to pay for your bags as incentive to use the DIY line? Hmm..
If that had been me, I would have declined to buy the merchandise.
My understanding was that this new gouge is supposed to discourage people from using plastic bags. Didn’t realize it was being extended to paper bags, too.
At Trader Joe’s here all the greenies show up with a bagful of wadded-up cloth bags, which they expect the checkout clerk to load. It indeed does, as Kevin points out about the automated lanes, slow checkout time. A lot!
When I lived in England (years ago) people carried mesh, fishnet-like shopping bags. Empty, they took up very little space in your purse, briefcase, or raincoat pocket. As I recall, shoppers bagged their own purchases in their own bags. Lines moved quite efficiently. But then, people didn’t buy as much as Americans: London flats often had only a small under-the-counter fridge, and so you could store only about two days’ worth of fresh or frozen food. Plus if you were making your way around on the buses and the Underground, there was a limit to how much you could carry.
In this country, where people routinely buy anywhere from a week’s to a month’s worth of groceries in a single trip, making people use their own bags is likely to produce some annoying inefficiencies.
Charging people to use plastic bags, BTW, isn’t going to stop the use of plastic bags. It just will mean that people will have to buy plastic bags for the needs for which they now use grocery bags–picking up dog mounds, for example, and wrapping large items for the refrigerator, and lining trash containers. Does anyone actually throw out a plastic bag without using it for something else first? This is just another way to raise the cost of living for us all and put everyone to extra inconvenience without accomplishing the alleged goal.
Great comments!
I definitely reuse my plastic bags, usually to pack my lunch & snacks for work, or those aforementioned “doggie mounds”! Glad I haven’t experienced the line slowdowns at my local grocery store… I’m sure we’re not far off.