[SllX]

The best alternative is to not even use a bag. 13 days out of 14, I don’t even need a bag or any other container, but that’s in part due to some lifestyle choices that put me in walking distance of a good grocery.

The next best alternative is to already have bags you can use, a backpack that you carry other stuff in for example with some extra room.

Beyond that, dedicated cloth bags work, or you can buy paper bags as you need them, and reuse them until they’re too worn; or use them as trash bags. Yes, they’ll require more resources to manufacture, but they won’t adversely impact the surrounding environment nearly as much as they degrade, and that has to be balanced against resource usage. If it helps, you can purchase a bag that already exists from a thrift shop or some other secondhand store so long as it seems sturdy enough and easy to clean. It’s been broken in already, seen actual use, and isn’t going to encourage the manufacture of a new bag to take its place once bought, or give more money to the original manufacturer.

A cloth bag can also be repaired, seams can be sewn up, and any holes that appear can be patched up. A badly beaten up bag can be saved as a resource to repair the other bags with, as can any other tattered clothes you might have.

Also consider baskets, as in old fashioned woven baskets. It only recently occurred to me so I haven’t thought this one through, but this entire conversation is built around the dichotomy of reusable versus single use bags. Baskets as a means of transporting groceries doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s radar or in any of these discussions. Supermarkets sometimes have leftover shipping boxes that you can pack your groceries in as well, but depends on the market. If you order a lot online, you might even have a number of boxes of your own you can save for your next grocery run.

The point of these bag fees, at the end of the day, isn’t to force people to pay a fee, or to specifically buy reusable bags. The point is force people to be conscientious about their bag usage and to consider a change of habits, and some other alternatives to just accepting the otherwise complementary bags that you don’t have to even think about taking.

[syshum]

>>I don’t even need a bag or any other container, but that’s in part due to some lifestyle choices that put me in walking distance of a good grocery.

So you shop for groceries daily? I can not image doing that

[michaelt]

I stayed with a friend who lived in London and walked to work through a commercial area; buying something like a jar of jam just meant stepping into a store she was walking past anyway. As easy as someone picking up a coffee or a sandwich every day for lunch.

Of course, shopping in convenience stores is expensive - but everything is in London.

[syshum]

>> As easy as someone picking up a coffee or a sandwich every day for lunch.

I do not do either of those things either. I get Drinks at work, and bring my lunch (if I eat Lunch)

[SllX]

Meat and fish, greens, and some vegetables plus whatever odds and ends I ran out of since my last larger grocery run.

Generally this means I’m never out of anything, my food is as fresh as the grocery store’s and/or the farmers’ markets, and I buy only what I need and will use in a dish within 48-72 hours.

Certain things, spices, a few different “safe” cheeses, and anything that I buy in a can or a jar tend to get picked up in one large shopping trip every two or three weeks, but also restocked in my daily grocery run on an as needed basis.

[aembleton]

With Lidl and Aldi I'm happy to shop nearly every day because their stores are small so I don't waste all that much time in them.

[kevingrahl]

I haven’t even thought about those wooden woven baskets!

But I suspect you‘d need two of them to equal the storage of a single standard plastic bag. And more than two baskets should be hard to carry.

[SllX]

Baskets come in different shapes and sizes, but if you aren’t picking up a lot, just enough to be a bit more than is easy to carry in your hands, or your mode of transportation precludes carrying your groceries in your hands, it could work, and double as your in-store shopping basket.