Nowadays it’s pretty common to bring cloth bags to the grocery store. In fact, at some fancy stores like Whole Foods you’ll get the stink eye if you don’t bring your own bags. But I grew up in the 90’s in Buffalo, NY where this was not the case. My dad was an environmental engineer and wanted us to avoid waste and extra packaging so he’d insist we’d bring cloth bags to our grocery store. When we got there, the checkout workers would just be confused and look at us like we were crazy, “but we have bags! We have paper and plastic!”

As a twelve-year-old I found this humiliating.