We live in strange times. Not too long ago, the implementation of the reuseable shopping receptacle was seen as the solution to the apparent scourge of the single-use plastic supermarket bag. It was the fix all, the amazing corrective remedy to help what was seen by some as the worst blight on our environment, or so we were told. The Greens were the loudest protagonists, making it the defining issue for their participation in Labour’s coalition government. Led at the front and by example by Julie Anne Genter, we all just had to suck it up and get used to change.
Well, I can report that today things changed. Forever. I’ll explain why in a moment.
Today, I drew the short straw in our bubble household – the prize of the dreaded visit to the supermarket. Nobody here really wants to go anywhere near that place.
The reason; well, things start in the car park where there are long lines of unsmiling punters, two-legged grumpy-faced potential virus incubators these days, each standing two to ten metres apart. (Why ten, you ask, I have no idea but some indeed are – extra precautionary perhaps). Some look like they’re doctors in a surgery, wearing disposable gloves, face masks and PPE suits (ok, I’ve exaggerated with that last one) and others just look like they’re heading down to the pub on a sunny Saturday arvo in singlets, scruffy baggy shorts and jandals. Again, not one of them looks happy. The only half-polite stilted conversations overheard between them relate to the Health Minister and his lockdown rule-breaking. The subject matter isn’t helping moods.
I’d dipped into my car boot, with its over-stocked supply of reusable shopping bags, and grabbed five or six before joining the back of the queue. It’s a balmy 23 degrees but standing waiting in the direct sun I can feel the heat of a mid-Autumn burn building on my face. It adds to the discomfort of just having to be there. After what seems an eternity, most likely it was simply a very long forty minutes, I feel an ironic sense of elation as my place in the queue nears the supermarket entrance. That’s when I notice something that fills me with surprise, anger and frustration, even more than the wafts of some other unsmiling punters’ body odour I’d been experiencing.
A large sign on the supermarket wall by the doors, two metres by one metre in size in big bold lettering, tells me “Please do not bring your reusable bags in store” – I literally gasped. The first thing that runs through my mind is not polite enough to write here but the next things is along the lines of “Those bloody stupid Greens! What the hell were they thinking?” My mind begins to race. I start to think about a bunch of confusing stuff. I realise I’ve just been completely triggered. I get concerned how I’m supposed to take my groceries home but then notice other unsmiling punters coming out the supermarket’s doors with trollies full of loose rattling items which they then take to the boot of their car and pack into the same reusable bags they came with in the first place.
My turn to enter the supermarket arrives at last comes, and immediately I get told that I can’t bring the reusable bags inside. I ask what I can do with the ones I’m holding as I’m not going back to my car to leave them there and then have to re-join the queue. I get a shrug from the masked 17-year-old boy standing guard but do get to follow his finger to where a bunch of them are in a pile next to the doors.
Well, that’s great, I think sarcastically. If there’s Coronavirus on any of the bags in the pile, surely it would potentially be easier for the virus to spread from one to the other when they get disturbed when they get collected? Nevertheless, I do what’s advised and head inside the store, which is somewhat calm and controlled – but that’s mainly due to the air-conditioning. I smile as I pass the same people (who only moments before were in the car park treating me like I had the plague) again and again up and down the aisles, each time well below the government’s primary guideline for minimum limits of social distancing. The same irony seems lost on the other unsmiling punters though.
I complete the shop, in record time I might add – largely due to there being only 40-odd people inside the store at a time, and on arrival at the checkout counters where I notice red lines have been painted on the floor to show where I must stand when approaching the counter and keeping a medically-infectious safe distance from the unsmiling punter ahead of me. She gives me a dirty look over her mask as if a warning not to test those red lines on the floor. I just smile back. After placing my groceries on the checkout counter, I have to then reload them all loose and rattling into my trolley – without a reusable bag in sight.
I feel my frustration return. I head back out the doors to the carpark, stopping briefly to collect my reusable bags from the growing pile of other unsmiling punter’s reusable bags. It’s a cluster as I have to untangle (and thus handle) other bag handles from mine… luckily, I’m wearing disposable gloves, although that adds to my already boiling blood. I return to my car and spend the next five minutes loading my bags full of groceries whilst trying to fight my trolley from running away from me down the slope into the cars parked across the carpark. I get in the car to drive with my angered and frustrated mind drifting off with thoughts about Julie Anne Genter and her Green Party’s insistence that we all should use reusable bags for the common good and how it was going to save the environment. I swear and curse out loud.
The simple fact is that the reusable shopping bag has turned out to be a recognised killer virus carrier and as of now we can’t use them as they’re not fit for purpose. Mark my words, things won’t change when most of our life gets back to normal after this Coronavirus lockdown either. The reusable shopping bag is going to be as much history as the plastic bag was. Thanks Julie Anne. Thanks for nothing.
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