The Paper Bag

The brown paper bag has just become a hundred years old, and we should celebrate.
That paper grocery bag is a symbol of many good things. We can bring it home from the food store full of meat and vegetables and it becomes an image of prosperity, it brings thoughts of shiny apples, dry cereal, clean and warm kitchen Americans. When we told the bag flat and store it  under the kitchen  sink it becomes an image of thrift of saving everything to use again.
Years ago papers bags were made by hand by boys working  for grocers. In 1851, a Pennsylvania school teacher invented a machine to make the bags, but this bags did not stand upright and could not be folded and stored  flat rectangular bottom and pleated sides. And in 1910, manufactures began to producing bags from a tough new kind of paper called kraft (a German word meaning 'strength').
Ever since then,  the brown paper grocery bag has flourished. Every American home has a stack folded large bags which came home full of groceries, and now wait for their next use. It's a large stack, too, because many shoppers insist on "double bagging" to be sure their groceries aren't too heavy for the bag. The bags will gave many uses.They will take out trash and garbage; they will be cut up for books covers. There's no end to the things these bags an do.
There really are a lot of brown bags around. In 1982, the nation's 26, 680 supermarkets bought about 25 millions grocery sacks made from good, honest kraft paper. Some however predict hard times ahead. A forest products expert says the paper will eventually give way to a polyethylene one, just the way the glass milk bottle and the paper cup has. He says the plastic bags are almost cheap enough to replace papers bags now.for the moment, however customers still prefer paper for their groceries. As one market manager says "Maybe plastic is the wave on the future, but not to my customers. They all feel you can't put much in the plastic shopping bags and that they rip. I'd have a hard time selling plastic to them instead.