To Tare or Not To Tare?

I don’t use produce bags too much and haven’t for quite awhile (15+ years at least?)…precisely because they do seem so wasteful and I was often shopping just for one so I would rarely have large volumes to be weighed together. The really weren’t necessary. I also remember that when I was growing up, we had a special drawer for produce bags and it was SO FULL…and we never even re-used or repurposed them like we did with plastic shopping bags so I think they would just get thrown away when the drawer was overflowing. I think that image was burned into my memory when I started doing my own shopping when I went to college and I wanted to avoid any similar type of situation. But now with a family and an increased volume of produce in my groceries, produce bags are useful from time to time. Enter reusable produce bags in different sizes!

When produce is sold by weight, these bags can be particularly helpful…or not. If you are trying to avoid using plastic produce bags, they can be helpful as a service to the checkout person (or yourself if you are doing self checkout) if you have a sizeable enough volume so as to contain the items so they (you) don’t have to deal with piling up items on the scale that may roll around and be a bit clunky. When prices are per item, it doesn’t seem to really matter. But where it is not helpful is in considering the tare weight, which means making sure you deduct the weight of the bag from the product so as not to pay for the weight of the bag. Yeah….it can be annoying. I’ve been to grocery stores where you can do this yourself in the self checkout and I prefer to do that. I’m not even sure a checkout person will bother with this task in most stores, but maybe I’m wrong. The bags in the pics above have their weights indicated on little tags in lbs, oz, and g so it does make it a tiny bit easier. For me, this annoyance and inconvenience is worth it when I do use these bags because reducing waste and avoiding the overflowing produce bag drawer of my childhood nightmares is more important, but I completely understand how it could be a turn off to some. I’m happy to see that many places now provide biodegradable produce bags although I still think reusable ones are less wasteful. So I try to use these reusable ones as much as I can because…every little bit helps.