Grocery Store Pet Peeves: Why Are My Groceries Always Bagged Wrong?
- Sue Leonard
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
Grocery Store Pet Peeves
This morning I went grocery shopping, which is a pain to begin with: trying to pick the right laundry soap from among 50 different versions, using a phone app whose grocery list isn't in the same order as the store aisles, and searching for favorite products that seem to have been discontinued since my last visit.
To make life easier for me—and, I thought, the bagger—I keep my reusable grocery bags in neat order...one larger bag filled with the smaller bags, neatly folded, with the insulated bags separate from the regular ones.
Imagine my frustration when the bagger aggressively dumps my pristinely folded bags into a chaotic pile on the counter.
If she only uses two bags, I still have to refold all the bags when I get home to store them. It takes me almost as long as putting the groceries away.
But I get ahead of myself. When I go to load the grocery bags in the car, one of the bags is heavier than the 25lb bag of kitty litter, and the other bags are as light as pillows. A 25-year-old weight lifter might have a hard time transferring the bag to the car. It seems like baggers put the heavy stuff (pasta sauces, soup cans, laundry detergent) in one bag, and cereal, potato chips, and bread in the other bags. Do they do that to prank us seniors?
I figured that since the baggers seemed to do everything they could to make my life miserable, they weren’t trained. I was going to vent my frustrations on the ‘Contact us’ section on the store’s website. “How stupid are your baggers anyway? You should train them.”
But experience tells me venting does no good, and I usually get back a perfect justification of why the company’s employees do what they do.
So I went to my online therapist: Dr. Google. Why the heck do they do this, and how can I make life easier for myself?
The answer was unexpected. Not only do they train them, but each store also has a specific protocol for baggers. And, of course, the protocol was designed to make the bagging as quick as possible, in theory, to make the customer happy with speedy service; but I'm guessing it makes them larger profits as well. Why pay for a gym membership when every grocery trip includes a complimentary weight-lifting session?
And not only that, Google knew the protocol for most of those stores, so it asked me which Grocery chain I shopped at. Who knew?
At first, Google gave suggestions that would ramp up grocery shopping from an annoyance to infuriation.
It suggested I pre-sort my grocery items on the conveyor, putting down one bag, then all the items for that bag, then a second bag with the items for that bag. And spreading the heavy items among the bags, putting only a couple of heavy items behind each bag. Oh, Google suggested, and it helps to have a mini scale while you are sorting to make sure you have even loads. Just kidding.
Geez. That means totally rearranging the items as I take them from my cart. I usually shop BOGOs, so I’ll have multiples of most items. As I shop, all the spaghetti sauce bottles are together. All the soups are together. All the Cheerios boxes are together. You get the drift.
With Google’s suggestion, I would have to dig through my cart to find one spaghetti jar, one soup can, then two Cheerios boxes, then find some moderately weighted products for my first bag. Here’s where it might help to have a scale. Repeat the process until I’ve emptied the cart.
Meanwhile, the checkout lady and the people behind me are staring daggers at me, and hopefully, no one behind me is a gun toter with an attitude.
The process seems a bit crazy.
But Google’s answers got worse. It suggested that heavy bags are no problem since they will carry your bags to the car. Oh yeah. Does the employee come home with me to get the groceries from the car to the apartment?
Google had an answer for that, too. “Some apartment buildings have luggage carts for such purposes.” Yeah, my apartment does, but if I only have two bags, I don’t want to walk a block to retrieve the cart, take it to my apartment, then cart (pun intended) it back. Apparently, Google has never tried to locate a luggage cart when it's raining and all the ice cream is melting.
Since Google’s solutions annoyed me as much as my poorly packed grocery bags, I started arguing with her. Every time it would tell me what I should do, I’d tell her why it wouldn’t work, or I didn’t want to do it.
Finally, I figured Google, who usually understands me quite well, wasn’t understanding me, so I decided to rephrase my original question. I tried to describe as accurately as possible why I thought I was presenting the perfectly organized, easy-to-use bag of bags to the bagger instead of just a jumble of bags. “My bags are like a file cabinet drawer with a large bag holding the individual folded bags, like a file cabinet with file folders. The bagger can easily see which bags are insulated, and they are all the same size.”
Success. Now, instead of some tedious process of me presorting the bags and the groceries on the conveyor belt, Google suggested that, instead of giving the bagger a bag of bags, I either lay the bags flat, one on top of each other, so they could see if I had different sizes or fan them out so they could see what kind of bags I had.
This whole dialogue went for two days and took about two hours in total. It’s a good thing I’m retired. But I learned a lot more about using recyclable bags than I wanted to know. Now I have a master’s degree in loading the conveyor at the grocery store. I wonder if I can get a high-paying consulting job as a bagger expert.
And I hope my next trip to the grocery is a little less frustrating.
Epilogue
The Current Reigning Grocery Bagging Champion is an 18-year-old Publix employee! Rocco Cammarota from a Georgia Publix won the national title.
The judging is incredibly brutal, and points are deducted if:
His family literally built a mock register in their basement—dubbed "Rocco's Den"—where he went through a grueling, multi-month bagging "boot camp" to train for speed and structure. []
So next time you go to Publix and they dump your bags, just remember: you might be dealing with an athlete who is training for the Olympics of grocery store checkout!
References
National Grocers Association National Show, Bagging Competition
The National Grocers Association (NGA) broadcasts the national bagging championship live on their Facebook Page - next one is Feb 2, 2027