Albertsons: re-usable shopping bags held like a dirty diaper

After years of living and working in China and seeing first hand the truly insane Dante's "Inferno"-esque environmental ravages there brought on by having become the "world's workshop," I have definitely become more environmentally conscious.

This manifests itself mostly in small ways, like buying energy efficient light bulbs for our house. Another small way is that I've developed the habit of periodically walking the mile or so down the hill to the nearest grocery store (which happens to be a very small, old-school Albertsons) if we need something small.

Well, yesterday I walked in there with my re-usable shopping bag (it even says "Albertsons" on it, since I had bought it there previously). These re-usable shopping bags are now 100 percent standard in Hong Kong. (There you have to ask the check out clerk for a disposable plastic grocercy bag if you need one, and they are dispensed with some disapproving reluctance.) But not here, I learned, as the bag boy took my re-usable bag from me like it was a zip-loc bag of my feces. Surprised by that reaction, I instinctively made a slight joke about it to the check-out clerk. And she looked at me stone faced, like I just offered her a zip-loc bag of my feces......