Tough to tell customers from thieves with bag ban
Our new ban on plastic bags has caused minor inconvenience for people who have long taken free grocery bags for granted. But a rise in spurious shoplifting accusations is an unintended side effect of this city bylaw.
A plastic bag serves as a marker of payment; anyone who has shopped at a major record store knows a sealed or stapled plastic bag was until recently the only ticket to leaving the premises without drawing the unwelcome attention of security. The 5-cent surcharge for a plastic bag means that wandering in and out of stores with a handful of goods is increasingly the norm, a situation that can lead to more than a few confrontations based on misunderstanding.
A slump in the economy may understandably put shop owners on the defensive in anticipating theft, but the plastic bag ban has made it much more difficult to pick out a shoplifter from an environmentally concerned shopper or, for that matter, a frugal one. Since the bag ban, I have witnessed an increasing number of incidents at stores where staff have confronted people leaving with a carton of milk or even walking by the storefront with a pint of strawberries. I have been challenged for the price of bread purchased at a nearby store and safely tucked away in my own canvas bag.
Shaming the shoplifter is one thing, but shaming the innocent customer is another. While stores have been relying on the plastic bag as a de facto proof of purchase, not to mention as mobile advertising, the bag ban requires shop owners to think of a new way of separating patron from perpetrator.
For the customer, becoming more diligent about saving receipts is one strategy, although at many stores these are not itemized and offer little proof of anything. Stickers are another option, where every item purchased is duly marked at the cash register. And not everyone seems to run into this problem – from what I've seen, merchants could save on stickers by offering them only to young people, who are, as usual, the most frequent victims of unwarranted suspicion.
And then there's the issue of trust. Vigilance is understandable, and the cloth bag does offer a ready-made alibi to wily shoplifters. However, if plastic bags are slowly being phased out, it means there needs to be a change in thinking about security. Catching a glimpse of someone with a peach in her purse doesn't imply the surreptitious activity it used to.
On the one hand, this might require that shoppers be watched more carefully from entrance to exit, their possessions searched and backpacks retained upon entry – a total surveillance scenario that seems nearly as unpleasant as a future of degraded ecosystems. On the other hand, can we ask for a little less suspicion and more benefit of the doubt?
Protecting the environment is not just about saving the rainforest or freeing the whales, it's about making Toronto a place that produces a little less waste. For their part, merchants must learn to scale back too – on accusations of shoplifting they have been making of late against customers who are trying to do their bit for the environment.
Stores that have long benefited from the free advertising emblazoned on their plastic bags would do well to consider how much more they will lose at the till from chasing consumers away, compared to their losses from shoplifting. They may well have to get more creative in policing their customers, but it's hard to believe that the plastic bag ban has made thieves more daring, or that the canvas bag has turned legions of shoppers into shoplifters.
Joceline Andersen is completing her master's degree in cinema studies at the University of Toronto.
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