plastic shopping bags in Europe
 

Small details of life are often the most confusing for visitors, so it might be a good time to talk about supermarket bags.

Free bags have already disappeared from a number of European countries, but since they are now disappearing from France, the most visited country, I think it is time for an advisory.

Free bags have now disappeared from the majority of hypermarkets in France, and the trickle down effect is beginning to reach supermarkets and superettes. It is expected that all free bags will be banned by law within a year or two.

So you can buy a typical thin plastic bag for 3 cents in most places. A heavy duty big bag is sold for 20 cents, and the ultra sturdy jumbo model goes for 50 cents to 1 euro. One thing to know about these last two models is that they can be exchanged free of charge for a new one if they are in bad shape or the handle breaks.

Have you also understood by reading this that in France, you bag all of your items yourself? Happy shopping.

My local Carrefour in Saran, France, where i spend a lot of time still bags groceries for you in free plastic bags - but i guess a change is coming. Thanks for the tips.

Carrefour, the world's 2nd largest retailer after Wall Mart, is under huge pressures to remain competitive in the French market and is probably cutting costs by eliminating the bag and bagging.

My nearest Carrefour in Paris had its "free bag" cut-off date on December 1st. It is sort of a shame because both Carrefour and Auchan had nearly perfected those little bagging platforms where the cashier just dropped the items into the bags and the conveyor belt moved them along...

On the bright side, self-check out is finally catching on in a few places. I was able to do it at Géant in Avignon last summer and at Auchan at Val d'Europe a couple of weeks ago.

I love self check-out. They have it at my local Delhaize in Belgium. You don't use disposable plastic bags when using the self-checkout; just into sturdy plastic baskets that go straight into the car. Saves so much time not having to get everything out on the conveyor belt and packing it again.

I hope the supermarkets don't eliminat those not-very-expensive insulated bags--I always bring several home to use during the hot summers here, and they're popular as gifts.

Both my local GB and Delhaize still have plastic bags for free. They come in handy at my house 'cause they are exactly the right size for my garbage bin in the kitchen and the bathrooms.

The argument about free plastic bags is that (a) they depend on fossil fuels and therefore do their bit for global warming (b) when discarded they muck up the environment like nobody's business and can be harmful to wildlife (c) it's such a waste. Hence certainly Ireland has started taxing them, and there's talk about it in the UK. I dont' know if that's also the case in France, but I wouldn't be surprised. It's hardly a hardship to get yourself a string bag you can keep on re-using, or something else that folds down small.

Well - most Americans traveling to europe don;t do a lot of supermarket shopping. but having to provide their own bags - esp a string bag - would be a shock.

Here you shop much less often - leave the store with 6 to 8 bags (usually paper inside plastic) and either the market has packers - or the checker helps you pack. (I won;t even mention the delivery service here in Manhattan.) And we do recyle the plastic bags for small trash cans in bath and bedroom.

they don't have to provide their own bags, they just aren't free, as I understand it. I suppose it is to discourage their overuse and waste, and I am all for that. At my local supermarket in the US, they overuse them and put too many things in a separate bag, even when unnecessary. For example, I buy the newspaper at the grocery store a lot, and they usually just put that paper by itself into a plastic bag.

Thanks for the tip, K.

A string net bag is light, easily packed and inexpensive.

Very useful for several small items.

((I))

Well this was Switzerland not France, but I purchased a canvas bag from the supermarket on the first trip and used it for my tote the entire trip (when it didn't have groceries in it).

Wow, no free bags, and you still have to do your own bagging?
And I used to think that "le capitalisme sauvage" advanced here in the South, not in the First World!

>capitalisme
Not really, it's a socialist achievment. Why would any citoyen be forced to do degrading work like bagging other peoples stuff. It's like at MCDonalds in Germany where you are expected to empty and bring your tray back afterwards. And free bags in shops have disappeard in the early 80ties as have coke cans a few years ago by indroducing a deposit of 25ct per can. France is still years behind :D :D

My husband and I always bring day packs instead of carry-on tote bags & them we put my groceries inside and the bottled/cans of soda on the outside bottle holder pockets.

Europeans' puzzlement at Americans' bizarre love affair with slow supermarket checkouts has nothing to do with socialism, but a very great deal to do with competent capitalism.

Repeated O+M research shows that the average checkout clerk in Europe processes about 50% more items an hour than his US equivalent. US supermarkets - protected from real competition by the socialist-era Robinson-Packman Act - tolerate this inefficiency.

European supermarkets can't afford to waste money on pointless gestures like forcing staff to stand up (which slows the process, but cons customers into thinking all is busy). Nor on bagging, which doesn't only slow the queue, but encourages wasteful overuse of packing materials.

On the other hand, walking into an American supermarket does offer us tourists the quaint thrill of revisiting the early 20th century. An unhurried world, where everything takes twice as long as it needs to, workers still haven't learnt to read, technology hasn't quite arrived yet, and no-one's discovered we've got an ecological crisis staring us in the face.

Put a thatched roof on it and you could reposition it as a theme park.

The Robinson-Packman Act requires that comparable terms are given by all suppliers to all their customers.


If you had something similar in the UK you wouldn't have lost all those independent booksellers you used to pride yourselves on.

Self-scanning eliminates the needs for packers, and even with a full trolley, it takes seconds to go through the check-out. While going through the supermarket, you scan the items, and sort them in baskets; you do not need to take them out at the check-out. There are random checks, to make sure people scan everything, but this doesn't really happen very often.

Hi

There have been no free plastic bags in Sweden for over 10 years.

A local Leclerc stopped free plastic bags in 1999

My local Intermarche stopped free bags on 1/1/06

Only a few French supermarkets still give the bags.

UK is behind, as usual !

Peter

flanner,

these ethnocentric, 'our-way-is-the-only-way' attitudes are tiring whether they come from americans OR europeans.

a true brit visits america and experiences the friendly american supermarket where your bagging is done for you...even taken to your car in some places. the true brit then returns home and winges about how 'crap' everything in britain is. come on flanner...i'm surprised at you.

perhaps your mindset is why there have been so many failures with retail stores doing business abroad. i know you work or have worked in retail and i only hope that you were kept off of any overseas projects. different things work in different markets and many an overseas adventurer has been burned by blindly implementing practices based on 'O&M research' or worse, what is done at home.

make an american bag his own groceries and your shop will be doomed. i bet you would also try to introduce dollar coin deposits for shopping trolleys. maybe 'pay and display' parking in suburban supermarket car parks. that's knowing the local market! laughable approach to international business.

i've spent enough time in america and understand this market enough to realise that the bagger is somewhat of a cultural institution. in fact, anyone who watches american movies realises this. perhaps the american stores find that some light chatter between housewives and the captain of the 'football' team working as a bagger after school is good for business.

i don't know what the payback on employing baggers is as i'm not in the retail business but i would suspect that they would be eliminated if they didn't provide value or if the absence of the bagger would go unnoticed by the american customer. i'm sure someday the american supermarket will 'progress' to providing less service, less transaction cost for the supermarket, few employees, less personal service for the customer. some things should not be blindly designed around 'O&M research'.

but the american way would fail in the uk...different approaches for different customers/markets.

i do agree with peter that the UK is far behind. much of europe has deposits for drinks bottles and cans (as do several US states). this promotes recycling and decreases litter. it seems kind of silly to address the shopping bag issue whilst ignoring the drinks container problem.

BYOB = Bring your own bags

Switzerland has been this way for years. I buy paper bags at Migros or Coop for 50 Rappen and reuse them until they break. You can still get tiny weak plastic bags for free but they aren't reliable.

Everyone packs their own bags here. Migros once experimented and used baggers but people complained that their items weren't being bagged properly.

I don't like grocery shopping here because I have to put all my items on the conveyer belt, get my bags ready, put the items back into the bag and then pay. The cashier has to wait and the customers behind me as well.

Shopping carts are coin operated as well. You get your franc back as soon as you put the cart back in its place.