I have a giant plastic bag hanging from the back of my kitchen door, full of other plastic bags. If you were to look inside those plastic bags, you would find still more plastic bags. My house is being taken over by plastic grocery bags. This giant mass of plastic is now the size of a small pony and has started bulging and (this may be my imagination) throbbing ominously. I'm frightened to stick my hand into it.
I blame the people at my grocery store. For some reason, they love to give out plastic bags - dozens of them at a time. If I buy five items, they get packed in at least three bags. Once, over my protests, they bagged a single item for me - it was a box of trash bags for the office. On another occasion, I begged them not to give me too many bags. I only had three items and I pled with them from the bottom of my heart not to separate my stuff. They looked at me like I was crazy, but shrugged and capitulated. I was very excited - I thought I'd won a small victory until I got home and found that they'd double-bagged my groceries.
I finally went to the store last week to see if I could get rid of my plastic bags. I'd been hearing a strange growling sound coming from the kitchen and was starting to get nervous. I went to the customer service counter and asked if the woman there if the store had a recycling program. She looked utterly stunned by the question, as if I'd asked her the atomic weight of cobalt or something.
"Excuse me?" she asked. "What is it that you need?"
"Well," I said, "I've got a lot of plastic grocery bags that I don't need and I'd like to turn them in for recycling. I was just wondering if you do that here."
"Oh!" she said, obviously glad to clear this up. "Plastic bags! Those are on Aisle Seven."
"No," I said, trying to find a way to rephrase this. "I've already got more plastic bags than I can use. I was hoping I could return them to you." This explanation was greeted with a look of slack-jawed noncomprehension.
"Right," I said, trying a new tack, "A lot of grocery stores have recycling programs, where you can return your old plastic grocery bags so that they can be ground up and used to make new ones. I was just wondering if this store does that."
She thought about this for a moment. "So... you've got... bags," she said finally.
"Aha! Yes!" I said with a note of triumph in my voice, "I have bags."
"Well," she said with shrug, "You'll have to talk to the manager about that." With that, she hurried off to turn me into someone else's problem.
A minute or two later, a very weary-looking manager came out from the back room. "Hi," he said cautiously, "I understand you're trying to sell some plastic bags?"
I explained that I was trying to recycle my bags, not sell them. After a moment's thought, he told me in a tone of deep regret that this was not something that this store did. I was feeling pretty worn-down by this time, so I didn't try to argue with him. I thanked him for his time and turned around to do a little light shopping before going home. I bought a box of cereal, a package of tortillas and a half-gallon of milk, then watched the bag-boy pack them up in two separate bags. I didn't argue with him either.
I went home, put away my groceries and gingerly stuffed the plastic bags into the big bag on the back of my door. It had reached the point where I realized that I really needed to keep feeding it. I really didn't want it to get hungry and grumpy.
