When I go grocery shopping, I'm buying probably 20 pounds of veggies, meat, milk, cheese, eggs, etc. along with bulky items like tortilla chips. If you use the woven plastic bags that you carry in your hands (like the old plastic bags but twice the size), you need 4 -- two for each hand.
There are also the jumbo super-heavy bags you get from e.g. FreshDirect where you only need one and you sling it over your shoulder, but those things are huge even folded up and I don't want to be carrying around one of those regularly. Folded, they're thicker than my laptop...
Do you not plan to go grocery shopping or do you always do it on the spur of the moment?
I'm not sure what the issue is. If you need to pick up something small from the store on the way somewhere you can definetly get a small always carry on you bag that will fit in a pocket.
When you're going to actual go grocery shopping just bring the bigger reusable bags. If the purpose of the journey is shopping it's not inconvenient to carry those bags and you'll have to carry the grocies back anyhow.
I get that it's less conventient to have to remember a bag but it's not some insurmountable task and it does seem to reduce the amount of plastic bags that get caught by the wind and blow around as trash.
Spur of the moment -- my schedule is always changing. I know I need to go sometime during the week but it's totally going to depend on when I happen to have free time on the way home, and I generally won't know that until I'm heading home. It might be Tuesday, or it might not be till Friday.
Always having a bunch of bags on me just isn't a thing, not when you walk and take the subway everywhere and don't want to be lugging around a backpack when you go out for drinks and have nowhere to put it when you're standing around a bar.
I'll take the big bag when it's on the weekend and I'm making a special trip to the supermarket, but there isn't always an opportunity for that either.
When I go grocery shopping, I'm buying probably 20 pounds of veggies, meat, milk, cheese, eggs, etc. along with bulky items like tortilla chips. If you use the woven plastic bags that you carry in your hands (like the old plastic bags but twice the size), you need 4 -- two for each hand.
There are also the jumbo super-heavy bags you get from e.g. FreshDirect where you only need one and you sling it over your shoulder, but those things are huge even folded up and I don't want to be carrying around one of those regularly. Folded, they're thicker than my laptop...