Once I was only the person who chauffeured my wife to the supermarket each week and who waited patiently to push the loaded trolley to the car park and unload the groceries and other consumables into the back of the car. Now as a result of a falling accident my beloved is incapacitated with a badly sprained ankle and a wrenched knee I have now become the shopper in the family.

Armed with my idiot sheet and strict instructions from her indoors I head off into that hitherto unknown world that is the confusing maze of supermarket aisles like a hunter gatherer. Even if I say so myself, I am gradually becoming quite proficient in buying exactly what I have been told to buy and occasionally I get patted on the head for spotting and securing a real bargain.

It has certainly opened my eyes to the behaviour (not always good) of the public in general and to observe some things about modern day shopping that could do with some improvement. In fact I have now reached such a good standard that I may well have out-smarted myself as my wife doesn’t seem to be making her usual quick recovery rate from minor injuries. Could she possibly be malingering on this occasion? Surely not - perish the thought.

Before the world was partially buried in plastic shopping bags nobody knew where anybody else had been shopping because, on the whole, shopping bags were individual, and totally free of store names. Well, I say that knowing that we had a couple that bore a tiny Prada or Harrods logo, nothing ostentatious you understand. Of course, I wasn't always so flush, or so flash.

I remember one winter's evening, it must have been sometime in 1947, at a time of severe rationing when my mum was on her way home from my Gran's, in possession of the usual gift of a shopping bag swollen with staples. To her horror she discovered when we arrived home that she had left it on the bus.
The next day we duly turned up at the bus company’s lost property office and enquired as to the bag's whereabouts. When the guy asked what was in it, so as to establish ownership of the bag, my mother told him that there were eggs and cheese and 'something else'. Her reluctance to clarify the 'something else' became understandable when the man, grunting with the effort, hefted the bag onto the desk and on opening it revealed eggs, cheese and about a quarter hundred weight of coal. Imagine trying to get that amount of nutty slack in a plastic bag!

Another bag that haunts me was my leather school satchel. It was brown on the outside while the inside, at first glance, it looked as if it had been fashioned from the hide of a Friesian cow, but any resemblance was simply due to umpteen bottles of spilt ink on its original white surface. The flap of the satchel was curled and dog-eared; a perfect match for my shirt collar. Small wonder that one of my school reports noted that both my work and appearance were sometimes untidy. Teachers in those days just had no concept of street cool.

During my career as a sailor I had an assortment of bags but I can only really remember a canvas sea bag and I only recall that because of my only foray into the dark underworld of smuggling drugs into Britain. My cousin, Sheila, who was more hip to the beatnik/poetry scene than me, had given my dad a pipe which I thought would be fun to fill.

I can still recall the horror I felt when the customs man opened up my sea bag and found, inside my sea boots, several six inch long blocks of a brown sticky substance which he triumphantly pounced on and confiscated because I had already used up my tobacco allowance. In retrospect it was probably just as well as shortly afterwards my Dad stopped smoking altogether.

I rarely see anybody with a shopping bag nowadays that isn't made of plastic generously donated by a supermarket chain that seem impervious to accusations that their generosity is damaging the environment. Of course some supermarkets do try to limit the wanton destruction of our world by charging for the bags which at least attempts to inhibit over consumption by encouraging people to retain their old bags. To no avail in my case as I always forget mine with the result that I have a huge George Henry Lee bag overflowing with smaller bags from many different supermarkets.

Even Kwiksave has finally started giving bags away when once they used to offer two types of bag; a penny bag, for light purchases or a three penny version for heavier items. I somehow miss the inevitable question checkout girls must have been coached to ask a customer if the latter asked to buy a bag:"Do you want a strong bag or a penny one?” I sometimes couldn't resist the temptation to reply:
"Oh a weak one please. The weaker the better; have you perhaps got one in a state of virtual collapse?”

Sighs all round as the girls knew that their question was loaded and were probably tired of smart-arsed comments from part-time male shoppers like me.

Of course, many of these bags hold not just groceries but also carry a je ne sais quoi, while others can become the focus of social opprobrium. In short, the humble plastic shopping bag provides yet another manifestation of that quaint British institution, inverted snobbery.

The cause of this phenomena stems from the influx of supermarket chains from mainland Europe, all of whom operate at a lower profit margin than their British counterparts. On average, the profit margins of companies such as Aldi, Netto and Lidl are something like four to five per cent lower than Sainsbury's, Tescos or Safeway’s whose margin is in the region of between six and eight per cent. This is financial fact.

Aldi was one of the first to invade the supermarket stronghold, and for a long time they were a cash-only transaction company, which illustrates the fact that their target customers didn't necessarily, have bank accounts. Their policy led to a situation now legendary in Liverpool, whereby an elderly and disgruntled Liverpudlian male, on being informed at the checkout point that the German owned company didn't take cheques, retorted, “Well they certainly took enough of them prisoner during the bloody war!”

Amazingly, instead of responding with open arms to the low prices these new stores offer, many people would sooner be carried away in a body bag than be seen with one of their bags. I personally admire their cold meat selections, as well as their dairy products and ice cream. I regularly load up with packets of Ingmar Bergman smoked ham, Berchtesgaden yoghurt and vanilla flavoured Strength through Joy ice-cream.

One day I was at Aldi, putting my shopping into my car boot, when a woman wheeled her trolley up to the car next to mine and I noticed that she hadn't bought any plastic bags. She didn't have to because she had loads of them, all in her boot and all of them from Sainsbury's! I must remember that I thought. Well, I mean, why pay for them every time?

As bizarre as it may seem, but then this is Britain so it may not be that bizarre, even the economically less fortunate are infected with this inverted snobbery. Several years ago when we selected new carpet for the stairs and landings we got a company to lay and install them. One of the fitters had recently been released from prison, a fact he was quite open about. He was a smashing guy who had a baby girl suffering with Leukaemia.

Anyway, the conversation got around to supermarkets and he told me that he often went shopping in Netto but didn't dare do it when his other children were at home because they hated seeing Netto's hideously distinctive black and yellow bags. He said that his children referred to those people who openly sported the cheap and nasty black and yellow bags as 'Netto freaks'. I was in hysterics.

My answer to this baggism is simple. Abandon plastic bags, buy proper shopping bags, and make more trips to the shops. That way, we get much needed exercise, help the environment and consign an aspect of snobbery to the plastic dustbin of history.

I'm just off to Aldi and I am not taking a single Sainsbury's bag with me, as I got four bags at Marks and Spencer's the other day; one for a loaf of bread, and three for luck.

To the supermarket Manager standing by the checkout: “Make way for a class act!"

*2003
According to a recent consumer survey Aldi is now the dearest of all the supermarkets while Lidl is still the cheapest. 2009

Peter

Where are you from? England