Minor things that bother you

[Max Rockatansky]

A paper bag isn't fitting into my bathroom trash cans.  I can't use them as a glove to pick up dog turds either. 

Well, you're just going to have to buy plastic bags, then.

Or just get them from work, see my comments about military exchanges a couple posts up.  The Feds aren't beholden to the California plastic bag ban coming in 2026.

[LilianaUwU]

I was doing some DoorDashing today, I guess Wendy's is already getting into the Halloween spirit. They have some meal of misfortune thing that they're branding with Halloween themes. It seems like every year holidays/traditions like Halloween and Christmas get shoved down her throat earlier and earlier. And personally, I love Halloween the most as I'm a huge horror movie fan but when you're celebrating it for half of the fucking year, it kind of takes the fun out of it.

On a related note, I was once naïve enough to think I should put up Christmas decorations on November 1, but now I'm in agreement with those that say it shouldn't be until it's damn near too late. (I say as I still haven't taken down my Christmas decorations from last year.)

[Max Rockatansky]

I'm still surprised that my wife never took up my offer to tolerate the Christmas Tree being up all year. 

[kkt]

Unless a bag is already loose I usually do the bagging after the transition is over.  For whatever reason the modern grocery bags want to stick together and take effort to separate.  I rather just get my transaction over than having the register screaming at me because I'm not scanning fast enough.

Y'all in California still have single use bags?

NY still does...they're just paper.

I reuse my paper grocery bags until they fall apart, usually 20-30 times.  When it's time to retire them they carry weeds and prunings from the garden to the yard waste bin.

[kkt]

Yeah, I know it's fucking ridiculous, IMO.

I agree. Plastic bags are fucking ridiculous pieces of shit.

The only thing I've ever heard anyone say in their defense is, "Well at least I can come up with creative ways to throw them away."

Plastic bags are great because they're durable and can be reused for multiple things as has already been pointed out.

If you say so.  I don't see many reuses for the plastic bags the grocery store gives me.  I don't have a dog, and they're the wrong size for my bathroom garbage.  Once in a while I use them to protect books or paper when I'm outside and it might rain, inside of the cloth bag, but that's not very common.

[LilianaUwU]

My issue with plastic bags comes with the inconsistent quality. Some can be so tough that it can handle almost any weight while others will break if you breathe on them funny. I got a fleet of reusable bags and those at least are consistently good at holding whatever you throw at them.

[Scott5114]

Plastic bags are great because they're durable

No, they're not. Or at least the people at the grocery store don't seem to think so, because if you buy 20 items they'll give you 114 bags.

and can be reused for multiple things as has already been pointed out.

All of which are just creative ways of throwing them away, because they are literal garbage.

[Max Rockatansky]

I'd be more inclined to get on board with the plastic bag ban if the rest of the recycling system locally wasn't so farcical.  California makes recycling anything extremely difficult and it is hard to overlook having lived other places where it is easy.  It is often easier just to dump or throw things away given how user unfriendly the entire system is. 

I'll never understand why there aren't recycling machines for cans and bottles at grocery stores here.  You either throw them in your recycling bin where they invite people digging through your trash or take them to a recycling center.  The recycling centers are infamous for undercutting scrap value significantly and require a crap ton of manual sorting.  The locations have inconsistent hours and are usually fly by night operations.

None of this gets into how even more difficult it is to get rid of things like electronics or used motor oil.  I totally get why people get frustrated and toss everything out on the middle of farm roads.  I once spent an entire week on/off trying to find a place that would take the used motor oil Jessica's brother left in the back yard with no success.  It was ultimately just easier to gradually throw some it away in bottles and use it as weed cleaner.  Normally parts stores would take it in other states but here they have to be certified to handle the waste.

I still can't find a recycling center that will take our old dryer without charging a mint.  None of the neighborhood recycling drives will let me dump it because of the electronic components.  I'll probably just turn it into a dog house whenever I'm feeling creative one of these winters.

[SEWIGuy]

I maintain that banning plastic bags while corporations burn hundreds of acres of forests down for AI shit is a shitlib thing.

I maintain that banning plastic bags while pretending that paper and cotton bag production doesn't pollute the planet is a shitlib thing.

I don't think anyone contends that paper and cotton bag production don't pollute the environment. But trees and cotton plants are renewable resources, and create a product that biodegrades.

That being said, I would be annoyed if my state outlawed plastic bags entirely because they are useful.

[1995hoo]

I've used reusable bags for years, not so much out of any environmental concern as out of preference. They're more durable and hold more compared to plastic bags. Fewer bags is always better in my view, especially when I get home and need to take them upstairs to the kitchen to unload.

But I remember once, early on, when the cashier at Harris Teeter proceeded to put items in plastic bags and then put the plastic bags into the reusable bags. It wasn't worth making a stink about it. Nowadays I would, though, because in both Fairfax and Arlington Counties and the City of Alexandria local ordinances require you pay a plastic bag fee of 5¢ per bag. (Wegmans also charges that fee for paper bags even though the law doesn't require it. It's pretty funny to watch some customers going ballistic and arguing that because the law doesn't require it, they don't have to pay it. Those customers never win that argument, of course.) Most of the plastic bags we get these days are from having the newspaper delivered on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We wad them all up and drop them in the bag-recycling thing at the grocery store. We don't use them for the cat litter because we have some litter-specific bags that are a better size for that purpose and that are supposed to biodegrade.

The funny thing is how some people act so outraged about bag fees. Yet even back in the 1980s, local low-cost grocery store chain Shoppers Food Warehouse, which was very successful and popular for many years, charged 3¢ per bag. I don't remember anybody complaining about it, although I suppose Shoppers also made used cardboard boxes available for free and a lot of people just used those, so that meant there was a no-cost option. My mother re-used the same cardboard boxes every week for years. You also had to pack your own groceries at Shoppers. Fitting hers into the boxes was sort of like playing Tetris. I kind of enjoyed the challenge of figuring out how best to fit it all into the boxes if I went to the store with her. I suppose that's probably one reason why nowadays I don't have a lot of patience for cashiers who just dump groceries in the bag in random ways. (Look, some things should be common sense. I have two insulated bags that I put on top of the pile of bags, and then I put all the frozen and refrigerated stuff on the belt first. How difficult is it to understand that the insulated bags should be used for those things?)

I would really prefer just to avoid the manned checkout lanes and do my own, but Wegmans limits the self-checkout to 20 items or fewer and the bagging areas are small enough that having more items would cause problems.

....

(I bag after I scan too, but that's because normally I bring my own bags, and trying to figure out how to get that to work with the scale without the register inflicting psychic damage on me isn't worth it.)

I've found the trick to this is to scan the first item, then place it into the bag and place the bag on the scale all at once. Some stores here now have a "Use My Own Bags" button. You press that before you start scanning, then place your bags in the bagging area. But if they don't have that, I've found the method I just described works pretty well, provided the item has at least some weight to it. That is, scan the milk or the burger meat or whatever first. Don't scan a packet of taco seasoning first.