Pretoria - Bring A Bag, Take a Bag is trending on social media after Woolworths became the latest retailer to make shopping a bit easier for consumers who had forgotten to bring their own shopping bags.
The retailer has erected a hanging device in the shape of a tree in some of their stores, where shoppers who forgot to bring reusable bags can help themselves to one brought along by another thoughtful shopper.
The idea is to then bring the bag back and hang it on the tree, making life a bit easier for the next shopper who forgot to bring a bag along.
While this concept has been used in countries like Australia, this bright idea was sparked locally by Brent Lindeque, known as South Africa’s Good Things Guy.
He has for the past year been lamenting the accumulation of recycled shopping bags growing in his cupboard, the car boot and every other available surface space in his house.
“But now there’s a solution,” Lindeque said.
He told the Pretoria News that this whole discussion actually started last year.
“I then found a Reddit post in August this year with this concept being rolled out in Australia which I posted to my social media, tagging Woolworths with the idea. That post had over 32 000 likes and reached over 500 000 people, who mostly all agreed.”
Lindeque said Woolworths didn’t seem keen at first, so he contacted Spar who loved the idea and rolled it out in just a few days.
While many retailers are phasing out plastic shopping bags and replacing them with reusable bags, it has created a separate problem. Many shoppers forget to bring their reusable bags along and are then forced to buy another. The result is that these bags pile up at home.
Lindeque earlier pitched his idea on social media, where he said: “I mean, the bags were a good idea to stop the plastic problem, but we’ve just created a Woolies bag problem.”
He later wrote to Woolworths via social media, where he posted a picture of things going down in Australia.
He wrote: “This is what some grocery stores are doing overseas. So simple, but so clever, right?
“Also, this is what many South Africans are asking you to do. I mean, you don’t even need to paint the big tree… you could just have a ‘leave one, take one’ hook at the entrance of your stores.
“I'll be the first to donate at least 196 213 of my bags.”
The retailer responded by saying: “The idea is that customers will only need to buy bags once or twice, then reuse them over and over again.”
He said the reality was that while some remember to take their bags when shopping, there will always be those that don’t. “An initiative like this means that we can stop adding more unnecessary bags into the world.”
Spar started rolling out Lindeques’s concept of “leave one, take one” from last month at some of their stores, followed by Woolworths.
Lindeque, the editor of the online Good Things Guide, is on a mission to bring smiles to people’s faces as social media’s “good news guy”.
Pretoria News