#933 Six Cent Bag

Not long ago I was at the supermarket. I went through the self-checkout line¾I love pretending I make grocery checker’s union wages. At the end I was rewarded with a bag credit. The alert checker whose job it is to monitor all us amateur checkers was the person to bestow said reward.
I’ve taken to bringing my own cloth bag to the grocery store. It’s easier to carry than all those plastic things. And I get so annoyed with the build up of all those plastic things—in my home and in the landfill.
Occasionally, I’ll pick up a paper bag so I have a place to put my paper recycling at home, but for the most part it’s the cloth route. But what got me thinking was the amount of the cash rebate for using my own bag.
It was 6 cents.
So naturally I wondered, why 6 cents? Why not 7 cents, or a nickel? Did some marketing committee do some vast psychological survey with a multi-age and multi-ethnic demographic focus group that determined that 6 cents was the ideal amount to both encourage people to bring their own bags and still save the company money on the bags they weren’t using?
Because you know the company is saving money. My big cloth bag holds the equivalent of 5 plastic bags and easily 2 paper bags. But when my bag is full of more groceries they don’t pay me more. And when I just have two items I still get the 6 cents.
I’m not sure I fit the incentive profile anyhow. I used a cloth bag for weeks before a checker caught on and insisted I take the 6-cent credit. But then again maybe I do. Now that I know about the credit I make sure the checker supervisor does notice and I get my thrice tuppence.
But still, I think I could have been similarly bought for a nickel. Maybe because a phrase resonates positively in my brain from my youth, perhaps from some early Spanky and Our Gang film, “For a nickel I will.”
Then again, it makes sense that the supermarket doesn’t want to be associated with the term “nickel bag”...
America, ya gotta love it.