Plastic Bags Contaminated With Fecal E-coli

How do we know which stores are using recycled plastic bags?
Incidentally here in Britain shop assistants have got the disgusting habit of licking their fingers to make picking up a plastic bag easier for them

The store will usually offer 3-1o cents per bag off your grocery bill. When you walk into the store, there will be a big container and you just stuff your plastic bag into the container.

Next, some stores ( but not all as far as I know ) will take the used bags out of the container and package customers groceries into the bags. I suspect that most of the E. coli in the used bags comes from bloody meats placed in them.

Here in NYC it is a habit that I believe goes back to the daily reading of newspapers. Men did it then, as a means to easily turn a page. With time, I have seen women do it more often to open a plastic bag, as a cashier. Occasionally, I see a male do it, and then I am wondering what other preferences the male might have? Oddly, the habit, when done by a male oftentimes seems to be by a male that is overly "chatty," or originally from outside the U.S., either South America, Europe (usually Southern Europe), or the Middle East. I suspect it might be considered sophisticated by the finger licker? In that case, it would be worthless to mention the habit to the offender, since it is considered just part of the culture that one was raised in.

Some stores are aware of the unhygienic habit, and have given cashiers a small wet sponge, in a receptacle, to wet their fingers.

I think this is another example of society devolving.

It used to be common for individuals to count large amounts of paper money wet fingers. In banks there are money machines that count both the coins and paper so few tellers actually have to wet their fingers when making the count.

Moreover, with so much illegal drug activity going on, it's probably not a good idea to wet your fingers when counting paper money ( which could be saturated with grains of coke, for example.

The stores might be losing Hallal shoppers, or Kosher shoppers, due to the possibility that the bags might have dried blood from pork. I don't understand why the stores just don't give a small discount to those that bring their own canvas type shopping bags? Those bags can get washed with the weekly laundry.

If the shoppers don't want a used bag, they can buy a plastic bag for about 10 cents. It's impossible , in the Boston area to find a store that gives both plastic and paper together, any more.

Why? I don't know. Also some of the more " upscale " stores put the groceries into paper shopping bags. As far as I know the paper shopping bags are free.

Disposable plastic bags have been banned in Austin for about a year now.

You take your own cloth bags to the store and they put your items in them.

I try to keep one bag separate for meat items, and launder it regularly.

Makes things a lot cleaner around here.

Good idea.

Thankfully that hasn't been a policy in any grocery store that I've shopped at here in NYC. They use brand new plastic bags as they have to still rip them off of the cardboard thingy they are shipped in bulk with.

If you want to save that money and the environment, stop using plastic bags and bring your own canvas bag (or two or three) suitable size wise for how much you shop on a daily/weekly basis.

tsar, what I've found here is that your cloth bags have become a fashion statement.
People go out and spend good money so all their bags will match, or say some appropriate "green" thing on them.

Me?
I use bags I've collected from others stores when they were doing giveaways during the months prior to the ban, and bags collected from joining yoga, having a colostomy, or visiting the model at a new housing development.

we have many "farmers markets" where the dealers use recycled plastic bags that they dip out of the Walmart and other recycle bins.

We toss out all plastic bags that we get from the ACME or GIANT . Recycling such stuff is kinda useless anyway

I'm waiting for someone to notice that Miller thinks e. coli contaminates feces.
Escherichia coli are part of our normal flora. They 'belong' there.