Trying to buy sustainable at Walmart

Today, something strange happened to me at Walmart. I was waiting at the cash desk and the customer in front of me had only a single item to pay. After scanning this article, the cashier asked him if he would need a bag. Then it was my turn. You might ask why I think this little episode is worth telling. What I noticed about it, was the question for the bag, which provided the customer with a simple way of leaving Walmart without a single plastic bag. This is usually not so easy. Whenever one enters Walmart, one already sees the customers leaving the market, everyone of them with several to several dozens of small white plastik bags in the hands or in the cart. If you pay attention, you might also notice the trash cans right after the cashier’s desks, which invite leaving customers to throw in their plastic bags so that they can be recycled. At first thought, you might consider this a good idea, however, after a moment you’ll probably start considering it as not very efficient: it seems a lot better, instead of using bags over a distance of not much more than a couple of meters, not to hand out bags at all if they are not needed!

From my experience, it is not easy to avoid being handed useless bags. For one, the cashier has hardly a chance to put the items anywhere else than in a bag, since there is no room anywhere. The only chance to avoid it is to hand every item directly over to the customer, who then puts it back into his cart.

Instead of going to a cashier’s desk, I tried using the self-checkout, where I hoped to be able to use my backpack instead of the white plastic bags. At the self-checkout, I can scan the items myself. However, after scanning the articles, the machine asks me to put the item in a bag and there seems to be a mechanism that recognizes, if there is something added to the bags which sit right behind the scanner. If I don’t put the item into the bag, I cannot continue scanning. There is the possibility of telling the machine that I don’t want to bag the item. However, this has to be done seperately for every single item.

The best thing Walmart can do to avoid superfluous waste is to provide a convenient way of leaving the store without tons of plastic bags, instead of recycling the few that are thrown away right behind the cashier’s desks.

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