Bag It

Time marches on; society loses skills deemed necessary in an earlier, pre-technological age.

Today's case in point: Bagging groceries.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, the highlight of my trips to the local grocery store was watching the groceries get bagged. Fhlap, fhlap and a new paper bag was unfolded on its end. An expert bagger would put one hand in the bag and flip the groceries inside with the other, all the while scanning the checkout stand with one eye and winking at me with the other, or so it seemed. Mirabile! When we got home and prepared to put the groceries away, each bag was a near-perfect solution to a three-dimensional puzzle. Boxes and cans and jars were neatly and seamlessly stacked and nestled together. Fruits and vegetables and bread and eggs were carefully cradled to avoid being crushed. Baggers must have trained for in-store service as if they were going for the gold. There were, I think, bagging competitions.

Today, the tyranny of the plastic bag means not only a crush of idiotic plastic bags, each one holding only a couple of cans. It also means that when I ask for "paper, please" (all the better to hold my newspapers on the way to the recycler), I get a sullen look from the "bagger" who now has to do something more than simply dump things indiscriminately, and two at a time, into a plastic hole. I also get paper sacks into which my groceries are dumped, more or less indiscriminately, three or four at a time.

True, this is more likely to be a problem at stores such as Giant Eagle, which hires high schoolers to bag and doesn't train them well, than at stores where wages, benefits, and training are better. And bad bagging is a problem that I can cure myself -- by bagging my own, which I've been known to do. (In fact, the presumption that the store should bag may be a purely American thing.) In the small and subtle observations that make up our daily lives, I'm not ranting so much as noticing, and this isn't nostalgia so much as a brief and qualified elegy for a lost art. I've undoubtedly met sullen and incompetent baggers before, but the one I met last Saturday reminded me that something distinctive, not to say important, is disappearing.