It never rains?

I don't see the need. They are already half decomposed by the time I get them home.

We get paper bags, and take the recycling out in them. Pretty sure they'd dissolve in water, too.

Made from corn starch? Fantastic. You can feed them to the homeless.

The grocery store isn't using the bags. The Puma story and the Albertson's story are are unrelated. Too bad that would have been way better than the annoying bag taxes the cities around here keep trying to push.

oldebayer: The local Albertson's uses plastic bags whose handles break in minutes, and which allow almost anything not soft to poke through.

Their paper bags are not much better, but if I double them, I can usually get home without losing much.

Stupid Walmart doesn't even HAVE paper bags.

The Wal-Marts here gave out reusable bags with the Sunday papers as a promo.

The grocery store I shop at gives you 5 cents for every reusable bag at the checkout stand. My reusable bags paid for themselves long ago and have been earning money ever since. An added bonus is that they hold a lot more than the flimsy plastic bags do, so I make fewer trips carrying the food into the house from the car.

Foaming: The grocery store isn't using the bags. The Puma story and the Albertson's story are are unrelated. Too bad that would have been way better than the annoying bag taxes the cities around here keep trying to push.

THIS

buckler: A place I worked at used those cornstarch-based utensils. Try to stir your coffee with a spoon, and the spoon would come out twisted, melting and dripping. Good luck using those bags in the rain.

Your coffee is hot, that speeds up the process a whole hell of a lot

/Drop a gelatin capsule into cold or room temp water, then take another an drop it in hot water. Watch

wildcardjack: you won't survive saying "Gee honey, but I don't have the shopping bags."

Just keep some in the car. That way you're always prepared if you need to stop at the store on the way home.

Foaming: The grocery store isn't using the bags. The Puma story and the Albertson's story are are unrelated. Too bad that would have been way better than the annoying bag taxes the cities around here keep trying to push.

Thanks for explaining that to me, seriously.

I shop at an Albertsons about an hour outside of Santa Barbara and they just had to start charging 10 cents per bag due to a county law that just went into effect. I was hoping the new bags would be free.

But nevermind.

The bags dissolve in hot water according to one of the comments.

I've had starch bags--they do disintegrate into small pieces. So will regular plastic if exposed to UV for a while--that's probably why the streets aren't full of plastic bags snagged on weeds and filling corners. Unlike plastic, the pieces don't just get smaller and smaller, corn starch is biodegradable in months.

Plastic floats out to sea and gets mistaken for fish, jellyfish, then finally smaller organisms like shrimp, krill, planckton, etc.

It fills the bellies of sharks, then sea turtles, albatross and finally planckton. I don't think anybody knows one half of the harm it does when it finally becomes pieces that can only be seen with microscopes.

Starch bags seem to work just as well as plastic, but like all bags, they are made too thin and don't carry much weight nowadays. That's not the fault of the material, but an attempt to save material and money, so it's the customers, stores and manufacturers who are to blame.

Once you have seen and understood what plastic bags do to sea life and some terrestrial life, it's easier to ignore all the other silly arguments pro and contra and think globally, act locally.

We've done enough damage to the oceans. If we do much more, there could be a sudden and unexpected collapse (in addition to the slower and expected mass extinction going on now). This is life support, people! Life support! For us!

The local stores here have plastic boxes you can use to take things to the car or which you can buy and put in your car. They sell sturdy plastic bags made out of soda bottles and you can buy, or get any number of handy shopping bags for free. No need to deal with paper or plastic issues. I have a handy granny cart that cost about $20-30 which holds up to eight 2 litre bottles of cola and I can thus walk to the store and back again without worrying about bags breaking because I am either not using a bag or the bag is attached to my mobile shopping basket. At the grocery store, the cart will fit underneath the handle of the shopping cart (not all models of shopping carts work this way).

I have a maxim of my own which covers most problems in this world:

"Everything is always bad design or bad management, and the managers choose the designers."

Think things through. That's real competence, combined with memory, caring, promptness, etc.

I've seen a number of clip handles that make plastic bags more comfortable to carry and reduce ripping. Some are padded. You can find them in the type of stores that sell handy household or kitchen gadgets and shopping bags. Dollar stores are a good bet.

100 Watt Walrus: All you geniuses who are so brilliant as to think these bags might dissolve from a little condensation or rain, you should call this company right now and apply for a job. I'm sure they'd be relieved to have someone like you around to think of things they couldn't possibly have taken into consideration. You could save them millions of dollars and a lot of embarrassment. Thank god there are people like you around to realize this stuff when obviously the people who make such bags have not.

I bow down before your mighty intellects.

You clearly know nothing about the stupidity that is SuperValu and all of it's child companies. They'll do anything to save a buck and think nothing about the Law of Unintended Consequences. I've done some remodels (design part) for roughly a dozen of their stores. The exact number I can't recall right now. They skimp on EVERYTHING they possibly can. It's part of the corporate culture. Since Albertsons is based out of the same town that WinCo is based out of they have firsthand knowledge of how badly they're getting their asses kicked daily. If they can save a buck with the cheapest bags possible they'll do it. And then when you biatch about it, they'll try to sell you their branded reusable bags for 3X what they're worth.

Shop at WinCo if you have one available. If not, wait a few years. They're expanding quickly.