The new one-term governor of Connecticut[1], a Democratic version of Trump,[2] pushed through a ten cent tax on plastic bags, with a ban two years down the road. Besides reducing plastic bag use, Lamont figured to pull in $55 million in additional tax revenue.
Except that the two biggest grocery chains in the state, Stop & Shop and Big Y, chose to pull the plastic bags altogether. They say they're doing it out of environmental consciousness.
I think that's bullshit. They could have pulled the bags at any time. My belief is that neither chain wanted to fuck around with keeping track of the bags and charging tax on them. Especially Stop & Shop, which has a lot of self-checkout lanes and they'd have to police the customers over how many bags they were taking.
So in a way, they are saying "fuck you if you think you're getting more tax revenue, you assholes."
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[1] Ned Lamont spent the campaign telling voters that he wanted to put up toll gantries to charge tolls to out-of-state heavy trucks. It wasn't more than a few days after he won the election that he said that nope, he wanted to charge tolls on everything. His proposal to do that died in the legislature. Even his party, which controls the statehouse, couldn't stomach that.
[2] Another one of those limited/no government experience businessmen who think they can fix everything.
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1 comment:
A similar law passed here in California a couple of years ago with a similar reaction from grocery chains. The lightweight plastic bags are entirely banned here, only heavy-weight reusable ones are allowed, and yeah, the 10 cent per bag charge. A lot of stores quit providing bags immediately afterwards, but guess what. Customers were pissed. So now they provide bags again (with the 10 cents per bag charge) and customers either bring their own bags or pay 10c per bag.
Do customers at the self-checkouts abuse the system by taking more bags than they enter on the screen when it asks "how many bags did you use"? Sure. But given the amount of shoplifting that happens at these stores, shoplifting of 10c bags is the least of their concerns.
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