Nickel And Dimed for bags in New York City

This Week the New York City Council is planning on passing a bill to charge residents a nickel for every paper or plastic bag they get at a store when they go shopping.

And all those profits go to the store.

Let me get this straight: The City Council wants shoppers to pay for the bags they get from a store. In one of the most expensive cities in the world. Where rent is $3500 for a studio apartment. And people pay some of the highest taxes and electric rates in the country.

And now The City Council wants to charge them five cents for bags

*FACEPALM*

The New York City Council says this will lead to a cleaner environment. Yeah, it’ll get cleaner when people start leaving the city due to the high cost of living. There’s only so much people can take. And nickel and diming them at the stores they shop at over a bag may be the straw that breaks New Yorker’s backs.

Not to mention the customer service nightmare at retail. Want to slow down traffic at the front end of a store at the registers during busy periods? Have cashiers counting up bags to see how much they should charge for them. That’ll turn a 20-minute trip to a supermarket into a one-hour ordeal.

It’ll be hard to make profits on those bags when people are frustrated about getting out of a store due to dealing with this nightmare. I can only imagine the losses from shrink stores will have as angry people leave merchandise on the sales floor after they walk out because they’re tired of waiting for a cashier to add up how many bags an order used.

And this policy will practically put stores that have bag checks out of business. If people are getting charged extra for bags, and they feel forced to take one in these kinds of establishments, they just won’t shop there.

The Democrats in the City Council don’t understand how it was policies like this that led to the decline of New York City 40 years ago. It was little nickel and dime taxes like this that had people getting on buses to go shopping in New Jersey and Connecticut at their malls.

Taking revenue out of the city. And making it less attractive to residents, travelers, and tourists. When people get nickeled and dimed over things like bags they tell their families and friends not to come to the City to visit. That it’s too expensive. And it’s cheaper to just go someplace else.

But the Democrats say they care so much about the environment. By giving more money to businesses a nickel at a time. Again, the only people profiting from this policy will be businesses themselves. So how does that help the environment?

What the Democrats in the City Council doesn’t understand is that these are the kinds of policies that kill a city’s revenue long-term. Yeah, you want a cleaner environment, but not at the expense of citizens. The fastest way to destroy the revenue coming into a city is to go around nickel and diming people for doing everyday business like shopping.  That just drives people out of the city into competing cities and states and when they see how much cheaper it is to live over there, they just move there permanently taking jobs and revenue right out of the city.

New York City was on its way to becoming one of the greatest cities in the world again. But with nickel and dime policies like charging five cents for a plastic or paper bag it’s headed back down the road that turned the city into a cesspool from the 1970s to the early 1990s. It was little taxes like this that drove businesses and residents out of the city and made it virtually uninhabitable. In a city with one of the highest costs of living, you’d think the City Council would be focused on ways to improve the quality of life for its residents, not making it worse.