Deterrent

Several Fridays back I posted an article from the New York Times (and let me digress for just a moment here…when in God’s name is SF Chronicle going to figure out how to export their articles to Facebook with just a flick of the clicks? I’m getting a little annoyed to import all of my good stuff from the NYT) on my Facebook profile about the Irish and their stopped use of plastic grocery bags.

When I read the article I was reminded of an NPR story from a few years back in which drivers approaching the city of London have to pay a high toll to get in and drive around in their cars. The good people of Ireland have to pay a tax now—33 cents a bag—to have the plastic bags for their groceries. According to the article, Germany put into place a similar program. The Irish have subsequently found, as a culture, that the bags have become grotesque; even if you want to pay the tax and have the bag, it’s considered to be in bad taste to have them. You’re scorned for it there.

San Franciscans don’t have to pay the tax, but their plastic bags are being taken away from them, albeit VERY slowly. You can’t get plastic bags for your groceries at Safeway, but if you go to any local mom and pop market you can. You don’t have to pay a toll to get into the City, either, unless you’re taking a bridge—folks who live in the Peninsula and the west side of the South Bay just drive in.

But a tax wouldn’t work in the U.S., for some reason, like it does overseas. Taxes have gone up on cigarettes and gasoline and yet we pay any amount to have both.

Through it all, and somewhere I’m thinkin’…maybe this is why Europeans come to the States to buy stuff cheap and laugh at the value of our dollars. Perhaps this contributes to the economy tanking—Americans cannot be deterred, myself included. I would find a way to pay more, I suppose, for the right item. And they should tax my journals higher—I’m killing trees.

I have to wonder what drives the European differently. Another reason to travel overseas, and see for myself.