Kudos to Cold Storage
Before
One of my pet hates is plastic bags. They add millions of tonnes to landfill each year and can take up to 1000 years to decay. In some European countries you have to pay for them, and in other countries there are campaigns to get rid of them or reduce use. Singaporeans, meanwhile, seem to love them. It therefore came as a welcome surprise a month or two ago when my local supermarket introduced reusable shopping bags. The only problem was that they were located beyond the checkout (see above). I walked through to get some and put them on the counter and then, to my astonishment, the woman on the checkout promptly put them inside a plastic bag! I’m not much of a consumer activist, but I couldn’t let this matter drop. I contacted Mr Dennis Tan at Cold Storage Customer Service and he has very kindly intervened. As of last week the environmentally friendly shopping bags are in a prime position (in between the milk and chocolate). All Cold Storage has to do now is train its staff to encourage customers to use these bags.
After
Hey Jimbo,
I read that in Germany some consumers are, like you, fighting back at the checkout by removing all of the unnecessary packaging from their purchases and leaving it in the store for them to have to deal with. There are also suggestions that bin waggons will be fitted with sophisticated weighing equipment so that householders will pay for the actual amount of garbage they create. This might encourage some to reconsider their buying strategies but it might also result in nocturnal shenannigans in suburban districts when we see people transferring their own heavy rubbish into the wheely bins of unpopular neighbours. Its our wheely bin day tomorrow so I’m off out with me torch and some bags of rubble.