Elderly grocery baggers protest loss of work

MEXICO CITY — The coronavirus pandemic and changing consumer habits threaten to put an end to a decades-old practice of allowing elderly people in Mexico to earn extra income as grocery store baggers.

Baggers over 60 had expected to return to stores last month as pandemic restrictions eased in Mexico City. But Walmart de Mexico, the country’s biggest retailer, announced this week that they wouldn’t be allowed back.

The retail chain said Mexico City’s ban on plastic bags and the pandemic meant customers no longer want other people touching their groceries.

“Due to the health emergency, we have seen that our customers want to avoid third parties having contact with their purchases,” Walmart de Mexico said. “Added to this is the fact that under current law to protect the environment, we have stopped giving free, single-use plastic bags.”

Elderly baggers have held a series of protests over the last two weeks outside grocery stores and government offices, holding signs reading “We Want to Work!”

“It’s not fair,” former grocery bagger Maria Guadalupe Garcia told the Telediario news program. “I don’t have anything other than this.”

The “jobs” — they are considered “volunteers,” not company employees — are hardly lucrative. Some customers give them tips of about 1%of the grocery bill or less, with many just leaving 5 or 10 cents.

In some places in Mexico, teenagers are baggers, but in others the elderly were given spots under a program arranged many years ago with the government’s National Institute for the Elderly. Walmart said it had notified the institute in December that the arrangement would not be renewed.

But the baggers only got word of the change in May, when Mexico City loosened pandemic restrictions amid a drop in case numbers. That is because the elderly baggers — whose age puts them at higher risk for severe COVID-19 — had not been working at the stores since March 2020, and many had only recently contemplated the possibility of going back to work.