City of Pittsburgh Plastic Bag Ban

[TheFugitive]

This month a ban on single-use plastic bags at retail checkouts went into effect in the City of Pittsburgh.

Lots of problems with this.  For one thing the city and it's jurisdiction is pretty compact.  There are lots of surrounding communities which may have a Pittsburgh zip code but which are separate jurisdictions in which the ban does not apply.  Hence a lot of people can just travel a mile or two past the line and shop at stores that will still bag their merchandise for them.  This is certainly not good for any retailer operating within city limits.

At the one Dollar General location near me customers are REALLY upset.  The way DG had configured their checkouts they bagged as they rang and you picked-up your bags off of a carousel after paying.  Now that they can't bag you just have items going back and forth from the cart, which is really slowing down the whole checkout process.  The store has signs posted everywhere which basically say "We apologize for the inconvenience.  Not our fault, blame City Council."

Supposedly they are not really enforcing the ban on retailers yet, and when they do it will reportedly be a relatively low fine.  Why??  My suspicion is that they are afraid at the end of the day this bag ban won't survive a court challenge. (State Law in PA is pretty particular in the power given municipalities in what they can and can't do. Pittsburgh, being designated a Second Class City under state law, has more power to do stuff than a typical township or borough, but this seems to be a grey area).

But as of now it appears nobody has sued.  My sister has a theory as to why.  When she went grocery shopping at a Kuhns store that lies several feet within Pittsburgh city limits she noticed that they had replaced their plastic bags with paper, and without telling her they slipped a 10 cents per bag charge onto her receipt for each one they used to bag her order.  Assuming the bags cost a few pennies each this bag ban may actually be INCREASING their gross margins a bit.

[BillyGr]

At the one Dollar General location near me customers are REALLY upset.  The way DG had configured their checkouts they bagged as they rang and you picked-up your bags off of a carousel after paying.  Now that they can't bag you just have items going back and forth from the cart, which is really slowing down the whole checkout process.  The store has signs posted everywhere which basically say "We apologize for the inconvenience.  Not our fault, blame City Council."

Seems strange they aren't simply using paper bags (as that sounds allowed, with the note you had about Kuhn's).  That's what the stores here in NY have done since our plastic bag rules changed in 2020, and unlike the bigger chains (such as supermarkets), they don't even charge for the paper bags (unless they are in one of the few cities/counties where they are required to, most places didn't pass that part).

[TheFugitive]

Partly that may be an economy of scale problem.  Dollar General has over 19,000 stores.  Most of them are not in Pittsburgh or any other jurisdiction where a bag ban has passed or is likely to.  It just does not pay them to put these into their supply chain for a handful of locations.  Also if you look at the bagging carousels at their checkouts they were specifically designed for plastic bags, so a whole remodel is required.  They aren't going to invest in that until they're sure this thing isn't getting repealed or tossed by a court.

In the case of Kuhns I think some enterprising MBA there just figured out that this is a way to pad their margins a bit while redirecting any anger at the politicians.  Grocery is a very low-margin business and survives on that type of out-of-the-box thinking.

[BillyGr]

Partly that may be an economy of scale problem.  Dollar General has over 19,000 stores.  Most of them are not in Pittsburgh or any other jurisdiction where a bag ban has passed or is likely to.  It just does not pay them to put these into their supply chain for a handful of locations.  Also if you look at the bagging carousels at their checkouts they were specifically designed for plastic bags, so a whole remodel is required.  They aren't going to invest in that until they're sure this thing isn't getting repealed or tossed by a court.

Uh, what I said was that Dollar General IS USING paper bags in NY (and has been since they were required to), without charging for them (unless the specific county/city requires them to do so).  I only noted the other chain using them since that made it clear it was allowed, only since NJ prohibited even paper bags from grocery stores, not sure if dollar type stores were included or not.

They had no issue using them on the registers without any work when the rules first changed, though they may be set up differently now, since they moved things around, added self-check and more cold/frozen foods.  But that remodel was obviously not prompted by changing the bag holders :)

[TheFugitive]

The Dollar General I'm referring to went through a recent remodel where they installed bag carousels very much like what you see in most Walmart stores.  It has 3 arms that hold pads of plastic bags.  The cashier pulls one open and begins bagging as he/she rings, putting each item into the open bag as they go.  Once that bag is full they give the carousel a turn and begin filling the next bag.  The customer pulls off the filled bag and the process repeats as needed.

These things apparently were not designed to hold paper bags so they are going to have to be replaced with some other mechanism.  For the time being they are just handing items back to the customer after they are scanned which is really slowing down the checkouts.  Perhaps DG has a different distribution center serving New York and New Jersey, states where things like bag bans are much more likely to pass.  Get out into parts of Pennsylvania beyond the major cities and this is NOT going to be popular.

To me it's another case of politicians who have never spent one day in their lives working in a real job at a real business nonetheless deciding to dictate to those businesses how they are going to do things. You've got to consider the practicalities before making changes like this.

[BillyGr]

The Dollar General I'm referring to went through a recent remodel where they installed bag carousels very much like what you see in most Walmart stores.  It has 3 arms that hold pads of plastic bags.  The cashier pulls one open and begins bagging as he/she rings, putting each item into the open bag as they go.  Once that bag is full they give the carousel a turn and begin filling the next bag.  The customer pulls off the filled bag and the process repeats as needed.

These things apparently were not designed to hold paper bags so they are going to have to be replaced with some other mechanism.  For the time being they are just handing items back to the customer after they are scanned which is really slowing down the checkouts.  Perhaps DG has a different distribution center serving New York and New Jersey, states where things like bag bans are much more likely to pass.  Get out into parts of Pennsylvania beyond the major cities and this is NOT going to be popular.

To me it's another case of politicians who have never spent one day in their lives working in a real job at a real business nonetheless deciding to dictate to those businesses how they are going to do things. You've got to consider the practicalities before making changes like this.

Yes, I'm 99% sure that is exactly what our store had (since they were using plastic before the ban, then again for a while in 2020 when the state decided to not enforce it due to difficulty getting paper bags and people not wanting to use reusable ones).

They just stacked the paper bags there and opened one in the space where the plastic bags used to be, put items in and repeated.  Obviously not quite as hard, since they could put more stuff in one paper bag than a plastic one, so not as much need to rotate for emptying.  They did (for a short time) have signs that they wouldn't be able to provide bags for people with less than 5 items (even though they did at least once without asking, maybe just something to point to if they ran short).

Anyhow, it seemed to work OK, before they remodeled anyhow.

[TheFugitive]

Interesting.  I suppose if the paper bag is thick enough you would have a good point that it can actually hold more.  Like I said I doubt Dollar General is going to invest in any change here until they are sure this ban actually survives repeal attempts and court challenges.

Another interesting angle is that locations that had bag bans suspended them during COVID because it became apparent that re-using a bag is unsanitary.  It seems these politicians suddenly no longer care about spreading germs.

[BillyGr]

Interesting.  I suppose if the paper bag is thick enough you would have a good point that it can actually hold more.  Like I said I doubt Dollar General is going to invest in any change here until they are sure this ban actually survives repeal attempts and court challenges.

Another interesting angle is that locations that had bag bans suspended them during COVID because it became apparent that re-using a bag is unsanitary.  It seems these politicians suddenly no longer care about spreading germs.

More like they didn't yet know how the then new issue could spread, but once it was shown that it was not being transmitted by packaging (rather by people), they could go back to doing things like using reusable bags (the same as at one point it was suggested to clean wipe items before you brought them in the house, that also stopped).

[TheFugitive]

I suspect that I'm a good bit older than you are.  Which makes me old enough to recall a time when they were touting plastic bags as good for the environment because you no longer had to cut down trees to make the paper ones.

[TheFugitive]

A study of a similar ban on single-use plastic bags at retail checkouts in the state of New Jersey has concluded that the ban has backfired by actually INCREASING the amount of plastic going into landfills.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2024/01/22/new-jersey-bag-ban-followed-by-increased-use-of-plastic/?sh=295dd9cf6a85

Apparently what is happening is that people are not re-using the "reusable" plastic bags and are just acquiring new ones every time they go shopping or receive an Instacart order.  These bags, which contain much more plastic than the old single-use type, then get thrown away where they add much more raw tonnage of plastic to landfills than the old bags did.

[BillyGr]

I suspect that I'm a good bit older than you are.  Which makes me old enough to recall a time when they were touting plastic bags as good for the environment because you no longer had to cut down trees to make the paper ones.

Maybe not that much, I remember stores using paper bags as well and when they first started swapping into plastic.

A study of a similar ban on single-use plastic bags at retail checkouts in the state of New Jersey has concluded that the ban has backfired by actually INCREASING the amount of plastic going into landfills.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2024/01/22/new-jersey-bag-ban-followed-by-increased-use-of-plastic/?sh=295dd9cf6a85

Apparently what is happening is that people are not re-using the "reusable" plastic bags and are just acquiring new ones every time they go shopping or receive an Instacart order.  These bags, which contain much more plastic than the old single-use type, then get thrown away where they add much more raw tonnage of plastic to landfills than the old bags did.

Well, duh!  There's a reason they call them REUSABLE, not get new ones every time-able ;) 

The delivery situation should either be using something else (like plastic bins that can be unloaded at the customer's house or left then picked up at the next delivery) or be allowed to have paper bags (which the NJ law some reason forbid as well for grocery stores).

[TheFugitive]

I think the ultimate lesson is that legislators passing a bill have absolutely no clue how people in the real world are going to react to it.  And they need to quit pretending that they do.

The law says that people SHOULD reuse the new bags.  But WILL they?  Apparently not.

Here in Pennsylvania they passed a law banning old electronics from going into landfills.  Those things contain heavy metals and some other toxic components, so the law was well-intentioned.  Problem is they did not provide for any convenient way for people to actually comply.  Some businesses volunteered to be collection points, but then quickly dropped out of the program because handling those items was taking up lots of their time and labor and returning nothing, becoming a drain on their bottom line.  So once there was no place you could dispose of an old TV set legally people started doing it illegally.  I've seen them tossed into rivers, left out in the woods, abandoned on porches of vacant houses and dumped in the parking lots of out-of-business retail stores.

Being old I also remember the national 55 MPH speed limit.  It became the most flagrantly violated law in American history.  A whole culture grew-up around radar detectors and CB radios trying to evade it.  Eventually some western states decided they'd rather forego Federal highway funding than continue enforcing it, and pretty soon the Federal government gave-up too.

I also remember life before the 30-gallon Hefty Bag.  People would just toss their rotting garbage into metal cans outside.  Once a week the trash collectors would come and empty your can onto a burlap sheet and then carry them over their shoulders like a knapsack back to the truck.  It left a smelly, disgusting mess. Oozy garbage drippings everywhere.