storewanderer wrote: ↑August 27th, 2023, 9:50 pm
Petco uses thin bags and charges a 10 cent fee for those bags chainwide in areas with no bag rules. This bag fee program started around last April. However the bag fee is not assessed on online pick up orders, Instacart or whatever program they use, etc. The signs posted state the proceeds are for "sustainability." Recently the Petco I go to ran out of bags entirely. I asked about it and was told the system wasn't sending them bags because the system was tracking bag use based on how many bag fees they had charged and according to the system they should still have thousands of bags left so they couldn't order any more. Also loss prevention is reportedly monitoring employees who do not ring up the bag fee SKU at least sometimes, and observing their activities.
What is funny is some places where there is no bag fee but paper bags are mandated (parts of NY for instance), Petco is not charging a bag fee in those stores as those stores have not been notified of any bag fee. The only notification of bag fee has been for "thin plastic bags" so those stores using paper bags at no fee are not assessing any kind of fee at this time.
In CA they use super thick bags and have been charging 10 cents per bag for many years (whether or not it is charged is obviously another story).
Paper bags are required anywhere in NY (no plastic for stores, can be used for food service and places where nothing is taxable such as our local fresh vegetable stand).
The fees, however, were allowed to be authorized by counties and cities. Only a small number decided to do so (mostly the counties that make up NYC and a few scattered other ones - 8 counties total, of which 5 make up NYC, of 62 in the state) and three cities.
Beyond that, some stores/chains decided to charge their own fee at all stores (which, of course, was always allowed - see Aldi), but not all do that (and some seem to vary if they do or don't).
So, it's quite confusing if one happens to go to more than one area as to what is required or just stores choosing to do so (funny part is that the chains that choose not to charge when not required seem to be the ones you would think would - places like the dollar stores and Ocean State that are focused on lower prices, thus you'd think they would want to cut costs any way possible).
