Connecticut stores are losing their hand-held shopping baskets as plastic bag tax takes effect

One of the unintended consequences of Connecticut’s tax on single-use plastic bags is that stores are now losing their hand-held shopping baskets to people who take them to hold groceries or other goods as they walk to their cars or to their homes.

“People are just taking the baskets and walking out the door with them,” said Wayne Pesce, president of the Connecticut Food Association. “We’ve been laughing and scratching our heads about it.”

But any significant loss of these heavy-duty plastic baskets, which Pesce said can cost stores between $5 and $8 each, isn’t going to be a laughing matter to grocery and retail store managers.

“We’ve turned over virtually all of [our hand-held baskets] across our six locations,” said Robert Rybick, president and CEO of Geissler’s Supermarkets, which operates stores in central Connecticut north of Hartford. “We’ve probably lost 65 to 70 percent of them,” he said.

Pesce said he has no hard estimates on how many of these shopping baskets have actually been stolen by customers. “But it’s widespread enough that we’re discussing it,” he said, adding the matter was a topic of discussion at his organization’s January executive committee meeting.

The Connecticut Food Association represents the owners of about 300 grocery stores and supermarkets in the state and about 135 pharmacies.

Such restrictions on single-use bags have become widespread in an effort to cut the billions of plastic bags that are used once or twice and then thrown into the trash or out into the environment. And Connecticut isn’t the first place to experience this consumer response to the loss of those bags.

In Jackson Hole, Wyo., grocers were worried they’d run out of hand-held baskets. Customers there were frustrated by the local plastic bag ban and unhappy about bringing or buying reusable bags, according to local news reports.

Target stores in Sacramento, Calif., reportedly began attaching alarms to their shopping baskets that would go off if a customer tried to take them through the exit doors.

“Every retailer will deal with this in their own way,” Pesce said.

Some stores suffering basket losses have stationed workers at the doors to offer bags to customers trying to leave with a shopping basket, according to Pesce. Others have begun selling the plastic baskets to consumers.

Rybick said the Geissler’s chain hasn’t yet taken any special precautions to halt the loss of shopping baskets, other than to have a store employee accompany customers who say they want to bring the baskets as far as their cars.

“Our front-end personnel have become much more cognizant if someone says they will bring the basket right back,” Rybick said.

“In general, our adoption of reusable bags has been pretty seamless,” Rybick said. “We made the decision to eliminate [single-use plastic shopping bags] ahead of the law. … We thought it was best for the environment and our communities.” Geissler’s now charges customers 10 cents if they need a paper bag.

The state law required most stores to charge a 10 cent fee for plastic bags beginning in August 2019. The state intends to completely ban such bags in 2021, but many stores have joined Geissler’s in eliminating their use entirely.

Pesce said the good news for retailers is that the theft of hand-held shopping baskets “subsides over time” as consumers get used to plastic bag restrictions by either bringing reusable bags or buying bags to carry their purchases.

Most of the early complaints about the loss of store shopping baskets were coming from retailers in Fairfield County and central Connecticut, Pesce said. But he added that, when the issue was brought up at the association’s January meeting, “pretty much everyone was experiencing it.”

Gregory B. Hladky can be contacted at ghladky@courant.com.