Good Intentions=Inconvenience

Today I went shopping at Target. I bought an entire shopping cart full of canned goods, heavy jars of spaghetti sauce, boxes of cereal, and about 50 really tiny travel items for our trip to Yosemite. When I got to the check out counter I realized that there were no more plastic bags for the customer's convenience. This is because the city of Sunnyvale has banned plastic bags.

Apparently plastic bags are inconvenient for the environment. So now a million Target customers are going to buy 2 reusable bags a piece so Target will make $2 million dollars from reusable bag sales. And the tiny bit of cheap, reusable, recyclable plastic that was so convenient for me will no longer harm the streets of Sunnyvale.

No, even though plastic is used in almost every object that we use daily: cars, hair brushes, toothbrushes, shampoo bottles, toothpaste, appliances, mattresses, cell phones, razors, eyeglasses, light switches, bathtubs, buttons, toilet seats, contacts, refrigerators, cooking tools, trash cans, computers, ice cube trays, food packaging, furniture, milk cartons, TVs, remote controls, video games, fans, sun glasses, purses, pens, etc., the threat to the environment from plastic in Sunnyvale is over!

So, since I refused to be charged money to use bags made of cloth and trees, which require plastic parts and materials to be produced,  and I have left my many reusable bags at home, I will be inconvenienced.

I packed every single item I bought into my cart and then loaded each item into my car. The cans and jars rolled and clanged in my trunk as I turned corners and stopped at stoplights.

Thanks Sunnyvale. I will shop in Mountain View from now on, until they too ban plastic bags. Then I will drive in my car made with plastic, shop in the store built with plastic materials with my cart made with plastic materials, and will place my plastic jar of sphaghetti sauce and my plastic wrapped loaf of bread into whatever plastic bag I can scavenge. I plan on saving them from other stores and stockpiling them to use later when the city decides that convenience stores no longer have the choice to offer their customers convenience.