BYO bag = more likely to buy junk food (except parents)

[litebright]

I thought this was funny, and interesting data. I almost always bring my bags (at least on my big weekly grocery trip, not so much for quick ones during the week). 

I'd also never seen the numbers on how many times the different kinds of bags have to be re-used before they mitigate their own impact on the environment. 

www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/plastic-bag-reusable-junk-food/398372/?utm_source=SFFB

Shoppers Buy More Junk Food When They Bring Their Own Bags
Taking along a canvas tote changes what people purchase.


Susana Vera / Reuters

1.9k 477
JOE PINSKER JUL 14, 2015
Plastic-bag bans are currently on the books in about a dozen U.S. cities—a dozen cities that will be seeing fewer bags clustered in rivers, tangled in tree branches, and clogging storm drains. Those cities might also start noticing an uptick in junk-food purchases.

That’s the implication of a study that tried to figure out whether people’s shopping habits changed when they brought their own grocery bags. For the study, Uma Karmarkar, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, and Bryan Bollinger, a professor of marketing at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, analyzed loyalty-card data from some 140,000 trips to a single grocery store in California in the mid-2000s. They found that people are 13 percent more likely to buy organic products when they bring their own bags—and they’re also 7 percent more likely to buy junk food, such as chips and cookies.

To explain these changes, the researchers propose two theories, one for the boost in organic purchases and one for the boost in what they call indulgent purchases—chips and cookies. The first explanation is the simpler of the two: People who walk into a grocery store with canvas bags in hand are already in a greener mindset, and this affects their purchasing decisions. Although many people don’t even know precisely what “organic” means, they still perceive buying organic as doing a favor for the environment, so it makes sense that their environmentally-friendly mentality might lead them to be more open to purchasing organic foods.


The theory as to why bringing a bag makes people more likely to buy junk food is more interesting. Karmarkar and Bollinger chalk it up to what’s called the “licensing effect,” which describes the phenomenon that after people make a decision they consider responsible and noble, they feel justified in giving themselves a reward down the line. This sort of moral accounting may sound a little dubious, but it’s not unheard of: In one 2009 study, subjects who bought environmentally friendly products were more likely to later cheat at a simple counting game than those who bought things that weren’t explicitly labeled green.

It wasn’t just that the type of person who brings a bag—the Whole Foods crowd, really—also happens to be the type of person who cares about buying organic foods. Karmarkar and Bollinger were able to break down the data to show that individual shoppers behaved differently when they brought reusable bags versus when they didn’t. There’s something about bringing a bag that actually changed people’s habits.

One group of people proved impervious to the effects of bringing grocery bags: parents. It’s not entirely clear why this is the case. It might be because, as they shop, parents are thinking about what they need to feed their kids, not their own indulgence. It could also be that they’re less likely to view bag-bringing as a virtuous act, instead filing it under the category of parental duty. (The researchers were able to sort out the parents from the non-parents by seeing which loyalty cards were linked to purchases of diapers or baby food, but a later survey they administered suggests that the bag effect was dampened for all parents, not just those of young children.)

It’s funny, though, that these environmental and moral ledgers seem to have remarkably short, context-dependent shelf-lives. Bring a bag, enter the store, buy some Oreos as a pat on the back, exit the store—ledger balanced. But the human brain has a harder time tallying the consequences of actions outside of the bookends of a single grocery trip. Take the manufacturing of reusable bags as an example: It’s been estimated that those colorful polypropylene ones need to be used about 10 times to ensure that their production did less to damage the environment than a one-time-use plastic bag. For a standard canvas tote, the balance tips at about 130 uses.

And that’s just the bags. Once people get home, things get much worse: A typical U.S. household discards roughly $1,500 worth of groceries every year. Worldwide, wasted food emits the equivalent of 3.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, and, as my colleague Eleanor Smith has noted, “If food waste were a country, it’d be the third-largest greenhouse-gas emitter on the planet, after China and the U.S.” Maybe reusable-bag users don’t deserve those Oreos after all.

[aurora]

For the # of uses calculation, how do they define damage to the environment? Energy to produce and distribute the reusable and non-reusable bags? Full life cycle? Do they include impacts on animals for improperly disposed of plastic? What about the fact that I put 3-4 times as much stuff in my cloth bag as a typical plastic (so 130 "uses" may equate to 30 trips to the store)?

[juliachild]

Except I mainly shop at the farmer's market and Aldi, so bringing reusable bags is the norm and using plastic or paper makes me feel guilty. I don't feel like I can reward myself for bringing my bags.

I also agree with the question above. What was considered in the life cycle analysis of the bags?

[Deleted]

Did they take into account that people who bring their own bags are often the type of people who shop at farmer's markets and the like? It's not really clear how exactly they came up with their percentages.

I probably buy 90% of our food from the farmer's market and a community owned grocery store. So yeah, when I walk up in Kroger and use my loyalty card, I'm probably buying quite a bit of crap food. I don't go there often, so when I do, the junk food better watch the fuck out for me.

I've also been using the reusable bags for years, so...

[lilibet]

Jul 18, 2015 14:58:02 GMT -5 papiercherri said:

Did they take into account that people who bring their own bags are often the type of people who shop at farmer's markets and the like? It's not really clear how exactly they came up with their percentages.

I probably buy 90% of our food from the farmer's market and a community owned grocery store. So yeah, when I walk up in Kroger and use my loyalty card, I'm probably buying quite a bit of crap food. I don't go there often, so when I do, the junk food better watch the fuck out for me.

I've also been using the reusable bags for years, so...

This. I buy our fruits, vegetables, and meat at one store and dry products, junk stuff at another. I'm sure I get judged at the junk store. But at least they can't see what I've got after it's in my reusable bag!

Reusable bags are very uncommon here, so I can't really compare anything to other shoppers. I actually saw a girl walking out of the store with reusable bags yesterday and I sort of wanted to run up to her and do a secret handshake or something.

[meshaliuknits]

Jul 18, 2015 14:58:02 GMT -5 papiercherri said:

Did they take into account that people who bring their own bags are often the type of people who shop at farmer's markets and the like? It's not really clear how exactly they came up with their percentages.

I probably buy 90% of our food from the farmer's market and a community owned grocery store. So yeah, when I walk up in Kroger and use my loyalty card, I'm probably buying quite a bit of crap food. I don't go there often, so when I do, the junk food better watch the fuck out for me.

I've also been using the reusable bags for years, so...

Heh. Every time we have a post about people eyeing other people's carts I think about how crappy ours must look since its only gonna have frozen peas and maybe a can of beans that look at all healthy.

[Deleted]

Is it possible people are making short trips just to grab milk, etc when they don't have a bag but bring their bags on longer trips where they browse and get junk food.

[mominatrix]

We've been under a total thin-plastic bag ban for a while, here, and I gotta say, it's nice. Everybody brings bags, or you can pay a nickel for paper ones. The amazing thing is how weird those plastic bags seem to me when I get them.

The other thing is that you just don't see them floating around anymore. Like, I saw one in the street the other day and realized I hadn't seen one like that in forever.



...so it's not just the manufacturing of the plastic bags vs. reusable ones. It's the fact that some crazy percentage of them ends up being just tossed into the street, where it gets into gutters, etc, or people have to pick them up. There's something about them that makes them crazy likely to be litter.



Plus this:

[heyjude]

This sounds like a study funded by the plastic bag industry.

[StrawberryBlondie]

Jul 18, 2015 16:28:55 GMT -5 meshaliuknits said:

Jul 18, 2015 14:58:02 GMT -5 papiercherri said:

Did they take into account that people who bring their own bags are often the type of people who shop at farmer's markets and the like? It's not really clear how exactly they came up with their percentages.

I probably buy 90% of our food from the farmer's market and a community owned grocery store. So yeah, when I walk up in Kroger and use my loyalty card, I'm probably buying quite a bit of crap food. I don't go there often, so when I do, the junk food better watch the fuck out for me.

I've also been using the reusable bags for years, so...

Heh. Every time we have a post about people eyeing other people's carts I think about how crappy ours must look since its only gonna have frozen peas and maybe a can of beans that look at all healthy.

We play a game at the checkout line as we're putting our stuff on the conveyer belt. We decide what we look like... Healthy, unhealthy, cooks, takeout people, etc.