Whyweditched paper for plastic bags
Mel Courtney fondly remembers when his customers used to have their groceries packed in brown paper bags.
Courtney owned five supermarkets in Nelson for 25 years.
The first Courtney’s Mighty Market was in Trafalgar St in 1970, and stores in Atawhai, Stoke, Montgomery Square and Richmond followed.
In 1970, brown paper bags seemed ‘‘ideal’’. ‘‘They had a flat bottom, they were strong bags, they weren’t at all thin and flimsy,’’ said Courtney.
But times were changing, and plastic was creeping in. ‘‘It was the new trend and everyone was going that way, and you were expected to follow,’’ he said.
Courtney resisted using plastic at first - there was only one plastic bag supplier at the time and he wasn’t keen to be bound to them.
‘‘I left it some time before we succumbed to it.’’
Polyethylene, the plastic usually used in carrier bags, was discovered by British chemists in 1933. In 1965 a Swedish company developed the design on which modern-day plastic bags are based.
The lightweight plastic bag debuted in the United States in 1976, and many of America’s largest supermarket chains were switching from paper to plastic bags by 1982. By 1985, 75 per cent of US supermarkets were offering plastic bags to their customers.
One advantage of using plastic bags was that they didn’t take up as much room when stored.
‘‘They had versatility in their use,’’ Courtney said.
‘‘You had to use two hands to hold a brown paper bag and I think there was a convenience motive there to some extent, because you can understand with plastic bags you can hold two or three in one hand if you’re strong,’’ Courtney said.
As well as new materials, shifting shopping habits also helped change the way we bag our groceries.
In years gone by, shoppers would visit a grocer who would select the products they wanted, wrap them and deliver to their homes.
The world’s first-ever selfservice grocery store, the Piggly Wiggly, was opened in Memphis, Tennessee, US, in 1916. That store is credited with being the first to allow customers to move through departments and select their food themselves.
The first supermarkets in New Zealand appeared in the 1920s under the Four Square brand, and in February 1948 New Zealand’s first self-service Four Square was opened in Onehunga.
Ten years later, the first Woolworths-owned Foodtown opened in ta¯huhu with an 118-space carpark. The first Pak ‘n Save opened in Kaitaia in 1985.
Massey University history professor Michael Belgrave said New Zealand’s large-scale shift from small local grocery stores to large self-help stores during the 1970s probably contributed to the move from paper bags to plastic bags.
‘‘There’s a very big transformation from grocery shopping to supermarket shopping,’’ he said.
Courtney remembers Kiwis using plastic bags for groceries even before shoppers shifted to big supermarkets.
‘‘The bags were there when supermarkets were sort of coming, the first supermarket in Christchurch came in 1963 and the Richmond Mall, that was an Aucklandsized supermarket, in 1973.’’