Should I Be Upset?

For the moment, I beg you grant the following premises:

1. Plastic bag litter is a totally legitimate environmental hazard.
2. Pricing the sale (rather than the disposal) of the bags is the economically efficient scheme for reducing bag waste.

Sensitive about consumer psychology, grocers have 2 options: 

1. Impose a surcharge for bags (this has been the practice in East Europe for many a year) -or- 
2. Provide shoppers who bring their own bags a discount.

Economically, these are identical. It's the same deal with routine garment discounting: one shopper's sale is another's markup; it's just a matter of timing.

Yet for all that, many people seem to fall for the "limited time only sale" commercial kayfabe. And in a highly competitive industry like grocery, departing from the second option is strictly dominated. 

So what does this mean for me picking up my lunch from the Whole Foods today? Because I didn't bring my own bag, I didn't earn the BYOB[ag] credit, even though I brought my chow out by hand, sans bag. 

I subsidized the economic illiteracy of the common American consumer.

Lunch without romance. Sigh.