Trivia question: “What commodity do the French value above all else?” If you guessed baguette or price-controlled AOC wine, you deserve an honourable mention– but the real answer is plastic bags. I thought I had arrived at INSEAD with everything I could possibly need for the year… 2 financial calculators, an athletic-cut business suit, shorts for the warm weather, and gloves for the winter. I even brought a year’s worth of dental floss and razor blades figuring that drugstores here would charge an arm and a leg for ‘em.
In hindsight I should have thought to fill my suitcase with plastic bags. For someone like me who grew up in a country where supermarket cashiers smiled, bagged your groceries for you, and commenced each conversation with, “Paper or Plastic?”, France can be a bitter pill to swallow. Here you are expected to bag your own groceries under the watchful eye of cashiers who hiss at you if you take too long. Forget about free grocery bags. The supermarkets charge you for plastic bags if you can convince the cashier to sell you them. I am starting to think that cashiers in France are penalized by having the cost of plastic bags deducted from their hourly wage.
There is of course an environmental rationale behind the anti-plastic bag campaign, but the trade-off is that it requires consumers to carefully plan their shopping trips in advance. Because INSEAD participants lead busy lives, grocery shopping tends to be a spontaneously impulse event. I keep forgetting to show up at the grocery store with my own bags and thus I am forced to endure the same tortured ritual each time… the cashier scowls me with a disapproving look and reluctantly sells me some of her cherished plastic bags. On several occasions, they have even gone so far as to lecture me on the new legislation that will completely forbid all forms of plastic bags.
I just nod my head and smile… and dream of living in my version of Atlantis, where bags are free and plentiful, where the cashier does all the work, and I am free to peruse the latest celebrity gossip in the tabloids by checkout counter.
P.S. I found the caption photo by typing “Groceries” in Google Image. It pays to turn off your “Safe Search”!
