Editorial: What plastic bag ban? California stores still doling out disposable sacks
Editorial: What plastic bag ban? California stores still doling out disposable sacks
Photo: Lizzie Askenase / World Vision
Last week, as many shoppers across the country, including in my own hometown of Portland, Oregon, were heading out to vote in the election that was the culmination of a long year of campaigning and talking about our environmental impact, I did something that I rarely did: I stopped shopping at the grocery store — and I didn’t just stop shopping at convenience stores either.
My husband and I have a full-time work schedule and the carpooling option that allowed us to take a car for the last several months of his year-long overseas study project, which meant that we only got to spend three weeks of the year with our dog.
So on Sunday morning, after we arrived for our daily walk, we decided that a week of eating out was in order. We grabbed breakfast at a local restaurant around 7:30 a.m. to prepare ourselves for our outing.
This isn’t a habit that I’ve been able to sustain. We’ve gone to eat out twice a week for the past few years and before that, once a week for many years.
And like most people, grocery stores were by far my least favorite eating establishments. I’m not ashamed to say the first time that we went to a grocery store together was after we had adopted an adolescent Golden Retriever, Charlie.
We had never shopped at a store before that day, so I had no idea what to expect. But even I was surprised.
It’s amazing what you can learn when you see a store that you love every single day for years before you’re actually allowed to go shopping there.
My first instinct was that I didn’t want to eat at that store. But that wasn’t the case. The staff actually treated us with very friendly and warm hospitality.
They did not, however, allow Charlie to eat at the checkout counter. That being said, they were patient with Charlie during checkout. They
