It’s been weeks since Safeway angered San Francisco customers by switching to handleless paper bags across all San Francisco stores, and the new bags appear to be here to stay.
Safeway quietly switched to paper bags without handles sometime in April, despite some customers calling the bags “completely useless” because it’s more difficult to carry heavy groceries without handles. On Monday, SFGATE confirmed that all 13 Safeway stores were stocked with handleless bags, although some stores also carried paper bags with handles in addition to the handleless options.
Whether Safeway is planning on bringing back handled grocery bags is unclear. Numerous SFGATE requests for comments sent to Safeway’s parent company, Albertsons Cos., went unanswered.
Karen Aitchison, who is a senior, has been a customer of the Diamond Heights Boulevard Safeway store for 30 years. She said she was frustrated when she learned of the new bag switch due to the challenges of carrying the bags three flights up the stairs to her home.
“You can buy $7.00 bags there that are very heavy, adding to weight to carry upstairs, or cloth bags that don’t sit well on stair steps,” Aitchison told SFGATE via email. Aitchison added that she saved some of Safeway’s previously handled bags and is currently using those, having to “patch them up with strapping tape when needed.”
Handled paper bags have been spotted occasionally at some of the city’s Safeways, but SFGATE found that the vast majority of the stores are still stocking handle-free bags. Employees at Safeway stores located at 2300 16th St., 850 La Playa St. and 625 Monterey Blvd. confirmed that those locations had limited handled bags in stock. A customer service representative at 15 Marina Blvd. said that the store recently had handled bags but quickly ran out. Meanwhile, a store clerk at 735 7th Ave. said the store expects to get handled bags sometime this month, but couldn’t share a specific date.
In April, a Safeway spokesperson told SFGATE that the switch was a result of a “global supplier shortage” that limited the availability of handled bags, despite other major grocery chains like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s carrying the handled versions.
Nick Vyas, director of the Randall R. Kendrick Global Supply Chain Institute at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, told the San Francisco Standard that global supply chain issues are impacting paper bag supplies. The cost of wood pulp, which is needed to make paper bags, has increased, and handled bags require more wood pulp, Vyas said. That’s led some companies to purchase the thinner, handleless bag options that cost less. Grocery chain Fred Meyer in Washington also recently adopted the handleless options.
In January, California banned reusable plastic bags, although a spokesperson for the city told KGO-TV that the ban does not apply to San Francisco because of the way the law was written. That means Safeway could possibly have the right to use heavy plastic bags with handles in place of the paper versions.
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This article originally published at San Francisco’s ‘useless’ Safeway bag nightmare continues.