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I was at my local organic co-op today, and I discovered that they have, as is typical of hippy-dippy stores, a reusable bag policy. In this case, every reusable bag I use, up to four total bags, gets me a small discount.
Being the sort of person who posts on the Motte, I immediately thought of gaming this system by putting as few items as possible in each bag. Preferably, I would buy four items, put one item in each bag, walk the bags out to my car, deposit the items in a separate container, then go back inside and repeat the cycle as often as necessary to get everything I want and maximize the discount.
This is, of course, both strictly legal under the store’s very poorly written policy, and also going to get me banned in no time.
But it led me to think of the deeper issue. Many, perhaps all, policies and laws are prone to extreme lawyer-brain galactic thinking like this. Imagine that the store couldn’t just ban me, because I am a member of the store and they can’t just get rid of me, and they must also put in place a policy that is fair to every member of the store. So they start trying to specify the volume of bag that must be filled, the types and sizes of bags that are allowed, minimum item counts in each bag. Soon, cashiers are bogged down in the minutiae of various arcane bag to discount ratios, rather than just scanning items and making pleasant small talk. Everyone is worse off, and the only plausible escape is to eliminate the discount itself, thus taking away a benefit of being a store member and reducing the overall value of that status, causing long-term harm to the store’s “health,” as it were.
Fortunately for my local Hippy Mart, they can still keep a FAFO policy in place for the chronically politically diseased such as myself. Anyways, I was just thinking about this and the contrast with the American legal system, which would be obviously incapable of maintaining such a simple and poorly written policy for longer than a nanosecond or two.
I think that in this particular instance, it is simply that the rules as written are bad. If you want to incentivize people avoiding single-use bags, then the following should work out fine:
The cashier would simply have a line item "all-reusable discount", and the computer would calculate the discount. Sure, you could still have discussions about what counts as a "reusable bag". Is any bag which was not provided by the store for free ok? What if someone buys a roll of garbage bags and then proceeds to use them to transport the groceries? But you would at least no longer be vulnerable to the exploit you describe.
Meanwhile in Germany, the thin plastic bags for loose fruits and vegetables are free, but every other bag will cost you. Nor will most supermarkets sell you shitty single-use plastic bags. Your options are to either spend half a Euro on a shitty paper bag which will probably fail if you fill it up, or pay a Euro (or two?) for a robust reusable plastic bag. I own perhaps eight of the latter and they can be reused for dozens of shopping trips easily.
Removing the discount for not having enough reuseable bags is a bad system. First, you are still saving the store money/reducing waste by bringing your own bag, so there is not a good financial/environmental reason. Second, this creates an incentive for buyers to limit the size pf their purchases to the bags they brought, which means more trips (bad environmentally) and smaller orders (bad financially).
The per bag system is basically fine. People hate the penalty of having to buy bags, so inplementing this without a legal mandate is very risky for the business. The amount of people who would spend the time to maximize the per bag discount is very very small, and the loss from this is also very small.
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