Loblaw’s logic in the bag
There are lots of big and obvious examples like seatbelt laws and car seat legislation, or campaigns against smoking and drinking-and-driving—every one of which has notably succeeded in altering behavior. But the one that amazes me most is the recent effort to get us to switch from disposable grocery bags to reusable ones.
The Loblaw grocery chain announced this week that it will no longer hand out free shopping bags. In a bold effort to curb the incredible quantities of plastic clogging landfills (and in partnership with WWF-Canada), Loblaw will henceforth charge a nickel each for disposable bag. The goal is to get us to use stouter, reusable ones instead. Loblaw will donate part of the proceeds to WWF-Canada, and has committed $3 million over the next three years to support a new WWF-Canada program focused on footprint reduction (Share it!: check it out).
Everything about this news is terrific. What’s truly fascinating, though, is the underlying psychology.
Rational beings will agree that it simply isn’t smart to throw away a billion disposable bags rather than re-use ones that work better anyway because they’re stronger and bigger and carry more stuff without splitting open and spilling your grapefruits over the sidewalk. We know what we’ve been doing is plain stupid, just as we knew it was stupid to put the car in gear without first fastening our seatbelts, but for years we’ve been doing it anyway until along comes a retailer with the moxy to impose a one nickel disincentive.
And it works! Loblaw reports a 75 per cent reduction in use of throw-away bags since it started the program.
What’s amazing is the tininess of the forfeiture itself. Five cents! Think about it. That’s the kind of coin we empty into dresser drawers and never see again until we move. This campaign is nothing like those painful crusades against smoking or drinking-and-driving that took decades of hard sanctions to pay off. People were primed for this one before it even started—all we needed was that tiny five-cent touch to push us through to where we knew we should have been already. (Interestingly, when the company provided a rebate to reward to shoppers for reusing bags, results were not nearly as good.)
I know it works because it’s even succeeding with me. For years I’ve been reminding myself to pack a reusable bag before I go shopping and for years I’ve been forgetting. Now that I have to look the cashier in the eye and confront that $0.05 surcharge—that almost wholly symbolic penalty—I’m suddenly remembering!
It’s astonishing.
Kudos to Loblaw. Not just for its recognition of environmental economics, but for keen understanding of human nature.
Scott Gardiner