Unintended consequences -- plastic bag ban in Seattle
From the
Seattle Post Intelligencer:
Store owners say plastic bag ban causes more shoplifting
When the Seattle City Council unanimously passed a ban on plastic bags and required businesses to charge a nickel for paper bags, city leaders believed it would be better all around.
"I think we've gotten to a place where it's really going to work for the environment, businesses and the community in general," Councilman Mike O'Brien said at the time.
But the bag ban is contributing to thousands of dollars in losses for at least one Seattle grocery store, and questions have been raised about the risk of food-borne illness from reusable bags that shoppers don't often wash.
Mike Duke, who operates the Lake City Grocery Outlet with his wife, said that since the plastic-bag ban started last July, he's lost at least $5,000 in produce and between $3,000 and $4,000 in frozen food.
"We've never lost that much before," said Duke, who found those numbers through inventories of stolen and damaged goods.
The Dukes opened the Lake City grocery store in June 2011, and Mike Duke said in the year before the plastic-bag ban losses in frozen food and produce were a small fraction of what he's seeing now. As he explained to seattlepi.com and also the North Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the shoplifters' patterns are difficult to detect.
They enter the store with reusable bags and can more easily conceal items they steal. The reusable bags require staff to watch much more closely, and even though the store has a loss-prevention officer and more than a dozen security cameras, it's tough to tell what a customer has paid for and what they may already have brought with them.
According to data released in January by Seattle Public Utilities, 21.1 percent of business owners surveyed said increased shoplifting because of the plastic bag ban was a problem. Results of another survey released in January – one done by an environmental advocacy group that found the ban "popular and successful" – didn't mention the problem of shoplifting.
And it gets better:
The Lake City Grocery Outlet also saw a dramatic increase in the number of hand baskets stolen after Seattle's plastic bag ban was initiated.
Shoplifters would fill up their baskets – some with purchased items and others with stolen groceries – and walk out of the store at 3020 N.E. 127th St. Duke would see the hand baskets discarded around Lake City and said the losses from the baskets and merchandise are in the thousands of dollars.
Fortunately, my store is outside of the Bellingham city limits (Bellingham passed a similar law last year). Most "plastic" bags these days have a sizable component of plant starch and will disintegrate in about six months. Paper bags are actually worse for the environment than the modern plastic bags.
As for the hand-baskets -- those puppies are surprisingly expensive. A good one is over $20 and a decent shopping cart is over $100. You need to realize that if I bought a simple basket at Wal-Mart for $10, it would be destroyed in one month of normal use. These prices are totally acceptable for the use and wear these items receive. That still doesn't make losing one of them any more palatible...
Posted by DaveH at February 28, 2013 8:38 PM