Apparently the city of San Francisco, where I reside, is considering imposing a bag tax on grocery bags in an attempt to “eliminate waste” and recoup some of the costs of waste management.
As a shopper on a budget, I’m pissed off. Scott and I generally go grocery shopping two times a month, and we tend to stock up on stuff when we go. Our groceries get packed into anything from 8 to 12 bags – some of them double-bagged to take the weight. My rough calculation is that this new tax would cost us about $6 a month. And that’s just the cost for our Safeway trips. It goes higher when you add in the odds and ends we pick up from other local stores, runs to the greengrocer, etc. All told this bag tax could cost us $100 a year. That’s not chump change anymore. Especially when I’ve just cut back my work hours for school.
Big grocery stores will also hate this because it will slow down their lines and increase their labor costs. If they have to count exactly how many bags are used for each customer and then charge for them, you won’t be able to close out one transaction and start the next one until after all the groceries are bagged. Plus, self-bagging will no longer be an option unless you bring all your own bags. That’s workable when all you’re buying is a few items, but not when you’re buying two weeks’ worth of stuff.
And need I point out that this is a classic regressive tax? People with even smaller budgets than ours will be hit harder by this.
It’s great that the city of San Francisco is trying to be a good manager of our natural resources, but this is a crappy way of doing it.
