Financial Report

Shopping Bag Use Plummets!

By Elka Malkis

As most of you know, we stopped offering plastic grocery bags to customers at the end of March. In their place, we offer a sturdy, washable, re-usable bag that is good for approximately 800 shopping trips. We currently sell this bag at our cost, which is 90 cents. At the same time, we increased the value of a green patch to 10 cents. Green patches are offered every time you shop using any reusable bag instead of a new paper one. You can donate the savings to the Soo Line Community Garden and the Green Institute or take it as a savings on your purchase.

I asked Annette in Accounting to review the last six months of invoices and find out just how effective the redoubled push towards reusable grocery bags has been. Here's what she determined:

In the 3 months of January through March 2008, the Wedge took delivery of 41,500 plastic and 205,500 paper grocery bags at a cost to the Co-op of $26,050.

In the 3 months of April through June 2008, we received 150,000 paper grocery bags at a cost of $15,295, and none of the old plastic bags.

This translates to a savings for the Co-op of $10,755 in just three months. More importantly, it means that Wedge customers used 97,000 fewer bags in those 3 months.

That was exciting news. Then I began to wonder just how these numbers related to the total number of transactions in those two periods. In the January through March period, there were 699,210 transactions. I calculated that a new bag was used every 3rd transaction (36%). Compare this to the April through June period when, with 751,751 transactions, a new bags was used only every 5th time, or 20% of shopping trips! That's a 45% reduction in bag use!