Kroger Promotion Shows Reusable Bags are Edging Into Mainstream

Kroger is asking customers to design their own reusable shopping bags. Those who enter get a free bag, and the winning entries (decided by user votes on the website Kroger has set up for the promotion) will get up to $1,000 in free groceries.

The move underscores how far the trend of reusable bags has come. A few years ago, cloth bags were mostly associated with hippies at co-ops specializing in organic food, whereas nowadays, nearly every major chain has its own version.

A 2007 article on reusable bags said "a growing number" of stores were selling them, including Stop & Shop, but Whole Foods was the only major player at the time to give customers a 5-cent discount for using them. And Costco was just starting to test reusable bags, but only in Canada and San Francisco.

A month after the article was published, Wal-Mart rolled out a black reusable bag with the words "Paper or Plastic? Neither." For Earth Day, 2008, Wal-Mart partnered with Kellogg to give away a million reusable bags for free, and later in the year the company vowed to cut its use of plastic bags one third by 2013.

Since then the attention on reusable bags has only grown. San Francisco banned plastic bags at major grocers in November, 2007 -- a move that other places are seeking to follow, while others, like Seattle, have looked at imposing a tax on plastic bags.

Whole Foods just announced that reusable bag use at its stores has tripled in the past year, saving 150 million bags from Whole Foods customers alone. The chain stopped carrying disposable plastic bags a year ago.

But aside from Whole Foods, it seems that many grocery chains are selling reusable bags, but not training their employees to look for them. As blogger Shelby Wood put it:

Usually I must rush to stop the checker before she automatically stows my groceries in plastic, a process that makes me feel at once panicky and ridiculous. The typical checker's response is apathy. Less typical but not uncommon is the look that says: "Gimme a break, you annoying hippie."

And the Wall Street Journal reported that a lot of these reusable bags just wind up lost in a closet somewhere, or even in a landfill. Baba Shiv, a business professor at Stanford, said that changing consumer habits is an extremely slow process, and it requires incentives. "Is it taboo yet to be carrying plastic bags? I don't think so," he said.

But more and more stores are offering discounts for people who bring in their own bags. In the Midwest, Lund's and Byerly's started donating 5 cents to a hunger relief charity every time a customer brings in a reusable bag. And Roundy's Supermarkets just expanded its 5-cent discount to include any reusable bag, not just bags made by Roundy's.

Which brings up one final advantage of these bags -- brand loyalty. Shiv told the Wall Street Journal that customers are less likely to bring a bag made by one chain into the store of a competitor. "What these bags are doing is increasing loyalty to the store," he said.