If someone asks for their groceries in a bag, does that mean they want paper or plastic? Jean-Patrick in Dallas, Texas, has had plenty of experience bagging groceries, and says his customers use the term bag specifically to mean the paper kind. We don’t have evidence that there are different names for these containers in different parts of the country, but we’d love to hear from you on this one. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Bag vs. Sack, Paper vs. Plastic”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Jean Patrick. I’m from Dallas, Texas. How are you guys doing?
Doing well. How are you?
Jean Patrick?
Jean Patrick, yeah. Kind of a weird French-Irish hyphenated name.
Oh, I love it.
Thank you.
What’s going on, Jean Patrick?
Well, I had some questions. I mean, I’m somewhat of a recent transplant from Iowa down to Texas,
I know you guys encounter quite a bit of calls from Texas about unusual Texasisms and things like that.
But one that really kind of got on my nerves a lot lately was I recently left the grocery industry.
In a particular grocery store I worked at, we had paper plastic bags.
And by default, they didn’t specify paper.
You put them in the plastic bag.
And what I encountered from time to time was someone who, you know, I’d start putting in the plastic and they’d go, oh, no, I want it in a bag.
And so I would clarify, I’d be like, okay, so you’d like paper?
And they said, yeah, a bag.
Like I’d been dropped on my head as a child or something.
Like, what is wrong with this guy?
I said bag. Why isn’t he putting it in a paper bag?
Why doesn’t he get that immediately?
So my question really is to clarify,
If this is sort of a more have to do with a regional thing,
Or what I’m thinking the most likely possibility is that they just were frustrated
That I couldn’t read their minds about what sort of bag they wanted,
But more specifically, is there some kind of contextual difference between like a SAC and a BAG?
Yeah, Grant, I don’t know of a regional component for that kind of difference.
I know that SAC is used all over the country except for parts of the Northeast and part of Pennsylvania.
Right, they would use BAG there.
But in most of the country, SAC is fairly common.
Yeah.
What’s really interesting, I don’t know of any resource or anywhere that data has been collected that shows that people automatically think of a bag as paper in the store.
No, I’m not aware of anything like that either.
Even if you go to Google Engrams and kind of look for all these permutations, paper bag, paper sack, plastic bag, plastic sack, you know, we see them rise at about the same frequency and kind of peak at about the same frequency.
And there’s not a great difference in them overall.
And we could solve this whole problem if people brought their own things to carry stuff in.
What percentage of people did that?
I’d probably say maybe 15%.
Okay.
Oh, really? Okay.
They’re bringing these reusable bags, right?
Yeah.
Recycled reusable bags.
John Patrick, this is a classic call where we must ask our listeners for information,
Whether or not they themselves think of a bag in the store as automatically being paper,
Or if they have some kind of distinction that’s very clear to them.
Right?
I don’t have it.
I don’t even think about it.
No.
Plastic or paper, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I have another question for you, Jean-Patrick.
Does it help?
I’ve always wondered this when you’re going through the line.
Does it help if I speak up and say I want paper or I want plastic?
Before you ask.
Or does that throw you off rhythm?
Definitely.
Definitely.
At this particular one, we’re like by default, if they don’t say anything, we’re supposed to put it in the plastic.
So my strategy was kind of from an economic standpoint, they kind of encouraged us to use more plastic bag if they didn’t have a preference.
I did not know that.
But I’d usually kind of greet the customer like, hey, how’s it going?
And leave a little bit of opening there for like, do you have a bagging preference?
This would be a great time to interject that.
Hot enough for you?
Yeah.
And if they brought their own bag and they’re hiding it somewhere,
That would be an opportunity for them to bust them out and everything.
Okay, so I should volunteer.
What you’re saying is I should volunteer my preference.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
I didn’t know if that threw people off.
So to summarize, John Patrick, we don’t know of a regional difference.
We don’t think that people in this country think of the bag at the checkout as automatically being paper
And then the plastic is the sack or something else.
But we’re definitely going to ask and come up with more information for you, all right?
We will hear.
Okay, thank you very much.
Thanks for calling.
Good luck.
Thank you.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
So the lights are on.
They’re flashing.
The siren’s going.
Your question for you to answer right now is, in your mind, is the bag in the store always paper?
That’s what his experience says.
It’s so weird to me.
Yeah.
877-99-9673.
I live in Indiana. I use the term “bag” for all kinds of grocery-carrying contrivances (paper, plastic, canvas re-usable…..). (I only use “sack” for “sack races” and in reference to sack-cloth clothing during the Depression!) However, I have noticed that my mother-in-law (raised in Ohio) says “sack” to refer to a plastic grocery bag. I sort of get the logic of the usage your caller noted, because to me, a “sack” is a soft, formless container that can’t stand up on its own, such that a paper bag could never be called a sack, so perhaps if sack is in common usage in that area, the use of “paper” with “bag” seems redundant. But I’m with Jean-Patrick; I would not feel comfortable making an assumption about the bagging preference of the customer until I heard the word “plastic” or “paper.”
About “bag” meaning paper bags: I work in a grocery store in Madison, WI, and I have had the exact same experience as your caller. The vast majority of my customers will say “paper” or “plastic” when I ask them if they want paper or plastic, but every once in a while someone will just reply with “a bag.” When I ask them if they mean a paper or plastic bag, they act like I just asked them a really stupid question.
This one is so weird; I’ve heard the opposite. As a former bagger at a Meijer store in Michigan, I always got the word “sack” for a paper bag, mostly from senior citizens (62 +). When someone requested a sack, I always took it to mean brown paper bag without confusion. Just as some say “sack lunch,” to indicates a brown paper lunch bag. A “gunny sack” made of burlap is typically brownish and may be where the sack reference comes from for paper bags. They’re both brown. I also think of “ransacked,” which Merriam Webster says is to “search thoroughly,” the example sentence involving robbers. I always thought it was because robbers “ran” in and “sacked” or collected/bagged up your belongings, in the process leaving a Tasmanian Devil-like mess of things.
I think he was being a bit crabby, annoyed with what he considered a dumb question. He wants a paper bag not a plastic one and was giving the poor kid a bad time
I’m catching up on podcasts and I was so happy to hear this question asked. I confuse people all the time and I don’t mean to. I grew up in southern Illinois and I use the words “bag” and “sack” interchangeably. But I have been living in Massachusetts since the 1980’s and if I don’t ask for a “bag” in this part of the country I get funny looks. No one seems to think of a “sack” as something one would take things home from the store or lunch counter. When I correct myself and say I’d like a bag, their faces clear right up.
I was raised in Northern Montana, about 45 minutes from the Canadian Border. For me, it is a “paper bag” or a “plastic sack”. If you say a “plastic bag”, you would be understood but there is no such thing as a “paper sack”. I’ve also lived in New York and in Kansas City and they usually use bag for both, many never use the term sack.