Illustration from 4allpromos.com
Seems resalers and consignment shopkeepers can’t make up their minds about how their customers will be carrying out their purchases. Every year, after NARTS Conference, lots of shops get on the “let’s-have-recyclable-bags” bandwagon. Then the enthusiasm fades.
Did they not get the recycled tote bags they ordered? Weren’t they thrilled with them (I don’t honestly know. No one’s complained to me, and BELIEVE me everyone even remotely connected to the consignment and resale world complains to Auntie Kate!) Did their clientele not embrace the totes the way the resale shopkeepers had envisioned?
Or was there a marketing disconnect?
Could be. Consumers need to be SOLD on everything…even NOT BUYING stuff. Sad fact, but a fact of life. If you don’t use every possible avenue of resource available to you, even the most self-less, eco-minded, sensible thing you’d like others to do with your help, will fail.
An article in the NYTimes about shopping bags (the oh-I’m-bad kind, not the Birkenstock Volvo unbleached muslin I-am-serious-about-this-shit kind) is rather Manhattan-centric, but worth reading. Several consignment and resale shops have long promoted the careful—-only— use of merchandise bags to take stuff home in. A consignment shop in Indiana is offering 10 cents a bag for reusable shopping bags… that is, the customer gets to donate the dime to her choice of several (presumably earth-friendly) charities. This ensures that the shopping bag, be it chic or plebeian, is passed on to a good home, just like the shop’s merchandise… and that her customers recognize their shopping expedition for what it is… an earth-friendly way to have something “new to you.”
But reusing shopping bags, or accepting (and USING!) non-disposable bags needs marketing, just like anything else in your business. So let’s get one it! Let’s show the world that the resale industry truly, really CARES. And not just in a “buy-more-to-be-green” way.
I say, let Nordstrom and the rest contribute to more and more manufacturing and turning trees into garbage. As long as consignment and resale shops keep reminding folks that things can, should…and even, for the sake of our children… must be reused.
Auntie Kate The Resale Expert 
You know, I would never have guessed that my customers really cared about the environment, but since I have started my “little project” of donating a dime to the park district for every handled bag customers bring in, they are refusing a bag and congratulating me on trying to make a difference. Such fun!