Hi Readers,
This is a seemingly insignificant, business cost which has been passed on to the retail customer by almost all retailers in the City.
The genesis is a notiification from a govt body stipulating that issue of plastic bags, regardless of their micron size, be discouraged, issued sometime in February 2011. Trust our worthy retailers to make capital out of that diktat.
My crib isn't against the few rupees charged for the convenience of using plastic bags - it's against the misuse of a modern malady of convenience.
In the guise of discouraging plastic bag consumption, all retailers are actually selling us their branded carry bags - in essense, making us pay for free advertising of their brand! If the real intent was to discourage plastic bags and only help out genuine customers who didn't get their own bags, why haven't retailers gone in for plain plastic bags!?!
I have written into the CEOs of most of the top retail brands in Mumbai, but barring the CEO of Globus, none bothered to revert as I have called their lie. Even this worthy, tried to justify this action by writing in a pompous revert.
The bottom line is that all retailers have coolly piggy banked on the department diktat and passed on thier packaging / advertising costs onto the customer and there is nothing we can do about it.
While most of us have started carrying our own bags (i make it a point to carry the bags of competing brands just to prove a point eg. If shopping at Dmart I use a HyperCity bag), for our grocery shopping, majority will baulk at taking our own bags to a westside / Louis Phillipe and similar, and they gaily charge upwards of Rs.7/bag.
Let's have some debate on this issue and see where it leads to and whether the retail rogues realise that their game is up and we have seen thru their con.
