Paper

Own only what you can always carry with you:

know languages, know countries, know people.

Let your memory be your travel bag.

~Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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My friend Ryan has an ongoing struggle with baggers at the grocery store. He wants paper bags so that wildlife doesn't get sick and die from eating plastic bags or from getting entangled in them. Simultaneously, he wants to use as few paper bags as possible so as to minimize his carbon footprint. According to his assessment, 88% of the time he goes to the store, he is dissatisfied with the bagging process.

He recently asked a bagger to put as many groceries as possible into a single paper bag. The bagger semi-successfully filled his paper bag, but then put the other groceries in plastic bags.

We talked about when people used to know how to bag groceries and shared our suspicions that perhaps plastic bags were the downfall to the bagging skills.

I am not sure what upset me more — his frustrating experience or the fact that we actually reminisced about the golden age of grocery bagging.