Like it or not — more of us are bagging our own groceries

Lawrence Barker says he’s frustrated that cashiers at major grocery stores he shops at no longer voluntarily bag his goods.

Barker finds bagging a hassle, as he feels pressured to quickly pack items into his reusable bags before the next customer’s goods slide down the conveyor belt. 

So he opts for self-checkout, where he can bag at a leisurely pace. 

“I am not rushed and haggard and I’m not having all my groceries all piled up like a traffic jam,” said Barker, who lives just outside Fenelon Falls, Ont., a rural community near Peterborough. “I go to self checkout just to avoid the stress.”

Barker recalls a bygone era when grocery stores often employed baggers at the cashier.

“And then suddenly, even the cashier bagging stopped and you were on your own.” 

Dozens of Canadians have posted similar complaints on social media, questioning why major grocery stores like Loblaws, Sobeys and Walmart seem to have reduced or eliminated cashier bagging services.

CBC News investigated and, it turns out, there are no simple answers — including from Canada’s major grocers. 

However, it’s apparent that the rise of reusable bags, fuelled by the federal government’s plastic bag ban in late 2022, has led to a general expectation in many stores that customers self-bag at the cashier.  

“Once we have our own bags, I think we just — the idea is just to pack it ourselves,” said Shawna Squire, carrying a bag of groceries she packed herself at the cashier at a Loblaws in Toronto.

“It’s become the norm.”

But why? Food economist Mike von Massow suggests that, aided by the reusable bag trend, grocers encourage self-bagging to cut labour costs. 

“I think if you ask, you’ll get the help, but I think the real incentive is to get you through as quickly as possible so that [they] can serve the next customer,” said von Massow, an associate professor at the University of Guelph.

“I think we’re being trained not to expect bagging… and we’ve sort of fallen into that trap.”

WATCH | The new normal?

Why bagging your own groceries may be the new normal

The shift away from plastic grocery bags also coincided with more shoppers bagging their own groceries, something experts say was largely a labour initiative to reduce staff and get people through the checkout faster.

‘We’re getting less’

CBC News observed busy cashiers at a Loblaws, Sobeys and Walmart in downtown Toronto. At each store, most customers did the bagging on their own initiative.

But typically, cashiers automatically did the job if shoppers bought new, reusable bags at checkout.

Sophia Berdousis of Toronto, who worked as a Loblaws cashier during the plastic bag era, says that she automatically bagged…