Grocery Bagging

What’s a skill you consider basic, that most people don’t actually know how to do?

This is one of my pet peeves. I have many, but this is pretty high on the list. In the past, before the days of self checkout, stores used to bag your groceries. Some still do, and if you go to the regular checkout, they will put your stuff in a bag. But what they do is combine everything in one bag without the proper sorting and it makes my right eye twitch. 

Believe it or not, people who bag groceries used to be trained on how to bag groceries. I know, I know, it’s a shocker. There is actually a way to do this without putting bread in the same bag as potatoes and mothballs. Or eggs in the same bag as anything else. They also should know that all of the refrigerated items should be together in the same bag(s), and the non-refrigerated items should be placed in their own bags, further separated by cleaning products and porosity of the packaging.

To me, this is a basic skill. I don’t understand why people don’t know this. We don’t put food items in the same bag as ant traps. We don’t put cold food items in the same bag as non-refrigerated items, because the end goal here is to keep everything cold on the way home from the store, thus reducing melting and spoilage.

I often have to change the bagging entirely when I get to the car if someone else bags. It is a rare occasion I find someone who knows how to bag groceries. And yes, I still get someone else to bag my groceries because my job title is not grocery bagger and I am paying for my items. So they will bag them. That’s part of the transaction. And I use the paper bags they give me at the store because I’m paying for those bags in the cost of the items on the shelf. Thank you very much. 

On the off occasion that someone actually knows how to bag groceries, I thank them and tell them I appreciate their knowledge. And then I tell them no one else knows how to do it, because it’s true.