After reading Boston Gal’s post about the DC bag tax, I remembered I should probably write about it.
I currently live in DC. I wouldn’t describe it as Downtown, but it is not far away.
I have a dog and a cat. I like plastic bags to scoop their poop. Because my dog likes to eat out of the cat’s litter box, my boyfriend scoops every night. Thus we use one bag per day. We have pet waste bags we bought cheaply online. They are like the ones some municipalities dispense for free. But we like grocery bags better because they are more convenient.
In terms of dollar impact, because we already use reusable grocery sacks, it really doesn’t matter to us. It’s fractional. It represents far less than we’ve saved with our supermarket club card on each trip. We make lots of small trips. In fact, it annoys the crap out of me that the supermarket baggers no longer double bag stuff that needs it. I end up with splitting bags from cereal boxes or the OJ carton popping out. I’d rather pay 5 cents than lose my food on the ground in an unrecoverable spill. (Luckily it only happened once.)
When we run low on grocery bags for pet waste, we specifically say we’re not taking our regular grocery sacks. Honestly, what is 5 cents a bag in a city where the dining out tax is 9%? Even before the tax, I was the kind of person who skipped the bag and shoved stuff in my pockets or purse.
I have no doubt it makes a big difference to people on food stamps because their Electronic Benefits cards are not acceptable for the bag tax. It has to be paid in cash. I’ve seen recipients during the first week of the month make mammoth shopping trips and use 2-3 carts. I can only imagine they still have to find $2 to pay for the bag tax. It’s kind of crazy that they charge people on food stamps for bags. It is an extremely regressive tax and I oppose that. But the flipside is that I support cleaning up the Potomac River for which the tax is collected. The Potomac is disgusting and I think that it should be cleaned up.
So for me, I feel like the bag tax has a negligible impact on me since I didn’t use very many bags in the first place and it represents a very tiny fraction of my income. But we’re treehugger types at my house anyway.
As for the lady quoted in Boston Gal’s post, I work in Virginia so I run a lot of errands there before I go all the way home. Because of that, I avoid the tax, but I don’t go out of my way to run errands in VA. They just have better shops there and parking that’s more convenient and the bag tax has zero impact on those choices for me.
Related posts:
- Reader Mailbag I don’t normally get a lot of questions. But I...
- Itemized Grocery List for Camping Since people were complaining about what listed as the grocery...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Do you (can you) use the vegetable bags as well as the shopping bags? I always have way more of those bags than I do the regular bags since I’ve been using my totes.
Not sure what you mean by vegetable bags. If you mean those super thin ones in the produce section, no. They’re too thin. But those are not the bags for which they charge the tax. Those are exempt. During the summer, I buy a lot of vegetables from the farmers’ market so I don’t end up with a lot of vegetable bags. Even so, I try to just have the vegetables loose in the supermarket cart unless they are small, messy or really fragile. (Think Thai peppers, corn or kiwis.) Lemons, bell peppers, and onions don’t need bags.
I wasn’t even aware of a bag tax. I guess that’s not too surprising since I don’t do any shopping in DC. The last time I ate at a DC restaurant, sales tax was 10%. Just ridiculous. DC is too expensive.
Anyway, I try to remember my reusable grocery bags. I think most grocers will give you like a $0.05 discount for each reusable bag you bring. The $0.05 isn’t what motivates me. I simply can’t get the plastic bag monster I saw at the Green Festival out of my head.
It’s been my experience that baggers really love using lots of bags. Even if I bring my reusable ones, they feel compelled to throw in a few plastic bags. I have to stop them. I don’t do it for the $0.05, buddy!