Wegmans offers reusable bags
By Mary Ellen Burris  

Wegmans has a new shopping bag for you! Or not, as you choose.

It's a reusable one, with a big flat bottom, that can hold up to 25 pounds. It conveniently folds up for easy storage, and is machine-washable (a concern with the colorful canvas bag we brought out last year). Spots should wipe off easily too. Made of a sturdy water-repellent, non-woven polypropylene blend, its appearance is very chic (just my opinion), black with our logo in white. It's 'cheap chic,' because the price is only 99 cents, with Shopper's Club card.

The new bag is plastic, but the reusability takes the curse off the charge by some that plastic things use up a non-renewable resource. It is recyclable, too.

A recent customer comment about bagging caught my eye:

'I'm writing today as a concerned consumer witnessing the waste that your store promotes. I stopped into the store today without my cloth bags. I bought eight items and left with four plastic bags. You MUST help our environment by encouraging your clerks to fill the bags. This is irresponsible and wasteful. Each plastic bag adds to the toxic pollutants that are found in our landfills. You can help stop this by teaching your clerks to not waste, encourage your customers to reuse bags, and teach your clerks to accept requests for paper bags with smiles, not rolled eyes and sighs. It's our responsibility to help our community.'

We promise to work on these concerns; the new shopping bag is a specific response to encouraging reuse. In case you're wondering, we're not going to pay shoppers to reuse bags, as a few shoppers have suggested. It actually costs us a little more to handle these, simply because they are not in a tidy bunch on the bag stand.

We use well over a million bags a day, and while there is an opportunity to encourage checkers to put more items in each bag (and so use fewer bags), there are customers who urge us to put fewer items in a bag, because they cant carry heavy loads. You'll find the new bags at most checkout stations and in front of the registers on special racks.

(Burris is Wegmans Senior Vice President of Consumer Affairs)

top of page

Copyright © 2007
Courier-Gazette, 613 S. Main St. Newark, N.Y. 14513 - 315-331-1000
All Rights Reserved