In today's Report on Business magazine associate editor David Fielding writes about the summer's hottest accessory, reusable bags. While Loblaws was the last grocer on the block to release one, it saucily dubbed its bag "Canada's greenest." The claim: While most chains offer a product made from recycled material, Loblaws' bag is also recyclable. Customers are encouraged to return them to the retailer when they're worn out so they can be used to make more bags. Loblaws' little black number soon became the summer's must-have item, proving that Canada's greenest bag may also be the country's greatest marketing strategy.
David Fielding was here Friday from 1-2 p.m. EDT to answer your questions. Join the conversation here.
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Judith Pereira, globeandmail.com: Thank you David for joining us today and taking our readers' questions. We have quite a few to get through and I thought we'd start off with a reader who lived in Adelaide, Australia where the plastic bag was phased out. He wonders if that's a possibility in Canada.
RB from Toronto: I lived in Adelaide, Australia which has outlawed the bag for two years now. That is great that the Loblaw bag is recycleable. In Adelaide, the grocers actually gave them out for free in the beginning, while others gave them free if purchased you purchased a certain amount in groceries.
We actually brought our 'green' bags up from there and find them better; our bags are slightly wider and longer, which allow more items in the bags.
One thing that must happen if this is the path we are going down is that cashiers need to be retrained in how to bag the items. It is a different animal in bagging compared to the plastic bags. It is the old 'paper bag' days but now some kind of new material. Also, not all cashiers credit you the penny per bag saved. Maybe upping that to say 5 cents and free bags can provide some incentives for habits to change.
Hopefully, then next we can start working on are those awful cigarette buts people through out the window.
David Fielding: Hi RB. All great questions. I agree with you that there's still a lot of confusion at the counters around the subject of bagging. I've even heard from one person who was told, rather unceremoniously, that it wasn't the cashier's responsibility to fill competitors' bags. (This did not happen at a Loblaws.) Perhaps it's a great opportunity to return to the halcyon days of baggers at the end of the counter. I wonder if customers would pay a few cents extra on their receipts for such a service.
As for giving the reusable bags away, I disagree. I think it's important to place a value on these bags, if only a dollar (which is what most stores are selling them at). If the bags had no retail value, and customers knew that they could get more for free with every shopping trip, there would be little incentive to bring them back. And that, to my mind, is the bigger hurdle.
Scott Martin from Ottawa: Good Afternoon David. My view is that the success of the Loblaw's black bag does not justify calls for regulation to force similar initiatives on other companies, instead it proves that corporate social responsibility and 'green marketing' prove effective enough, without laws that would undoubtedly bring the slew of unwanted side-effect's that is the hallmark of almost all government interventions. Can you comment?
