Reusing Bags For Fun and Profit in Arizona

When it comes to a good cause, a little enticement never hurts. This week, a shopping center in Green Valley, Arizona, is helping its customers jump aboard the plastic conservation wagon by turning “bring your own bag” into a game — to the tune of a thousand in prizes.

Starting this week, patrons of the Continental Shopping Plaza can bring in their own shopping bags to carry their purchases and be entered into a contest to win up to $1,000 in gift certificates to various plaza stores.

Roxanne Aiken, the shopping center’s property manager, says that the idea for the contest came to her whilst on a visit to eco-friendly Seattle:

“No one there expected a merchant to give them a bag,” Aiken said. “It’s like it was socially unacceptable to not have your own bag.” Aiken, associate broker for Wilson Property Services Inc., said she wanted to find a way to implement that kind of environmentally conscious attitude back home. “Merchants here at the plaza generally have been trying to think of ways to go green.”

As it is quite difficult to make something so widespread as accepting paper and plastic shopping bags suddenly socially unacceptable (that sort of collective social consciousness takes time), Aiken opted instead to try and make the alternative option fun and exciting: anyone who brings a reusable bag to the plaza can be entered into a biweekly drawing for a $50 gift certificate — and a stylish nylon tote bag to boot — and all names are further held for a $1000 gift certificate combo-pack grand prize drawing in November. But what about those hapless shoppers caught unawares and without a bag? Knowing that inclusion is a far better tool than exclusion, Aiken allotted a caveat to the contest rules — if you don’t come with a reusable bag, then at least come with two cans of non-perishable food for donation to the local food bank and you won’t be turned away.

And will bringing the food donations to the stores in a reusable bag increase your odds of winning? Probably not, but it can’t hurt to try. Now that’s incentive…

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Happenings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.