‘Tis the season which brings joy to a small, but devoted, group…collectors of shopping bags. Obviously the purchase is desired in its own right but the shopping bag, and the packaging in general, adds other elements to the experience. Tactile, visual, and, in the case of one store that I know which puts hard candy inside their shopping bags, the sense of taste is also involved.
Personally I admit to having hoarded “the paper” or, for that matter, “the plastic” since I was a teenager. I stored my bags by hanging them on a hat stand; overlapping so that nothing could be seen of the stand, or most of the underlying bags. It was a dust-trap, it was, most certainly, a fire hazard, and it looked disturbingly like the bogey-man if you woke up in the middle of the night and happened to look that way but it was also, in its own way, a method of holding onto memories.
