There's always a complication, when trying to do the right thing. Here, for example, a major grocery chain has been very proactive in getting shoppers to use cloth bags, and they conveniently sell 99 cent bags which are a good size, strong, and even attractive.

Catch: they also time their cashiers on how fast they pack bags, and there are perks for fast checkers and reprimands for slow ones. The cloth bags take more time (almost twice as much, according to employees I spoke with) to pack than the plastic throwaways, therefore checkers are not motivated to encourage use of the reuseables. Strategies these employees may use in an effort to keep their packing times acceptable to management include: pretending not to notice the customer's reuseable bags, filling the reuseables with just a few large items and using plastic for everything else, using plastic and letting the customer put the plastic bags into the reuseables.