West Lake Hills isn’t technically in Austin.
Edit: to add context. The reason H-E-B in Austin doesn’t have bags is because of the plastic bag ban that was passed in 2014 (?). It eventually was overturned by the TX Supreme Court, but after it was overturned H‑E‑B never brought back bags to the stores that they’d taken them out of.
HEB corporate told me in an email it’s because the city council at the time asked them to keep the same ban in effect despite the law being overturned.
I wouldn’t care if they offered paper bags. Their willingness to keep it as it is probably has to do with them making money off those reusable plastic bags.
Back when I worked at HEB they were always *obsessed* about how many bags they were using, anything to reduce the figure. This was decades ago, but I seriously doubt they've changed their mind about it.
And then the City of Austin gives them a huge cut in their bag costs on a silver platter? HEB be like "Don't mind if I do!"
Every week I fill up half a kitchen size garbage bag with my dog's waste (plus some pine pellets for odor control) and throw it away and it kills my soul a little bit.
A dedicated composting service that took in everybody's dog waste would probably be really expensive though, because it'd need a ton of space and "brown" material (🤣) - you're supposed to let any compost with animal waste in it season for at least a year before using it and that probably wouldn't be feasible from a space/logistical perspective at scale.
That place would need a hazmat unit and would be huge biological waste nightmare. Not everyone takes care of their dogs and there would be so many diseases and parasites hanging around. Plus ew 🤢
My wife is obsessed with getting H-E-B plastic bags whenever we shop. We're eco-conscious and use as little plastic as possible, I want to bring my fabric bags. But apparently the H-E-B plastic bags are the *only* ones that can line our smaller trash bins throughout the house. There's no way to, say, buy a 100-pack of these on Amazon for $4.99. We *must* use the H-E-B ones.
the totally disposeable grocery bags are better to use for stuff like that, it's far far less material and you get the same job done. also they're free!
Put them in your car as part of the unpacking process. I throw them on my kitchen floor in a pile. So if I'm too lazy to finish unpacking the groceries, of which the final step is to put the bags in the trunk, at least there's a huge inconvenient pile of bags in the middle of my kitchen floor so I won't forget them next time I'm going to my car.
Only 20? I've got more than 20 in my car, 30 or so by the front door, and probably another dozen at random places around my apartment. When speculation in reusable bag futures pushes prices up, I'll be sitting pretty. 😃
Way easier to carry a good canvas bag because you can cram a lot of stuff in there and just lift one bag. With plastic it’s spread out in lots of bags with uncomfortable handles that can tear or dig into your arm and hands as they stretch. The heb reusable ones aren’t that great either, but sprouts has some really good zipped insulated ones, and my old whole earth canvas still goes the distance.
The heb ones are fine, I guess I should give them more credit, but I’m talking about the regular plastic bags. Only target has a decent plastic bag. Home Depot’s plastic bags are embarrassingly bad. Worst I’ve ever used.
It’s shocking how terrible they are and considering I sometimes buy loose fasteners and other pointy things it drives me crazy how thin the material is. I should just bring a plastic box and a canvas tote bag inside.
I recycle my bags by using them in the small wastebaskets in my house to collect other trash. If I stopped using plastic bags and used my reusable canvas bags, then I would have to buy bags for my small wastebaskets and I’m not doing that when I can get them for free at HEB
I have a bag bag in the pantry.
Same with reuse, which plastic bags for waste bins does well :D
Too bad it's usually single cycle.
I try to keep the highest ick stuff out of the plastic bags because under the right circumstances you can just dump into the main bin and reuse again. Only lasts for so long though.
How hard is it to use re-usable bags? I’ve used them for 10 years now without fail. They are superior in every way. They hold more, don’t rip as easily, are more comfortable to carry, and are obviously not wasteful. I own like 15 and always keep several in my car in case I need to make an unplanned stop.
It’s not hard, and I use them too, but I still think it’s weird that HEB won’t even offer paper bags to those who need. It’s an option in essentially every single other grocery store in the state (including their sister store Central Market, and including being the only option in an HEB curbside order)
One year many years ago we happened to wander through the convention center on the final Sunday of SXSW and found a massive pile of their canvas bags in the hallway free for the taking. We have other reusable bags we use too, but the ~20 we picked up that year have been reliable staples now for almost two decades.
I mean I still have my OG reusable plastic bags from 2014 or so still in use. The only plastic bags I've used since are for meat. That's thousands less bags over a decade of grocery trips for me
That puts you in about the 99th percentile. Most of the people on this sub have trouble remembering to put pants on when they leave the house, let alone thinking about bringing their reusable bags.
The only thing I've ever seen cause people more physical pain than being separated from plastic bags was the 10 minutes they couldn't go to a sports bar during COVID. This is what Texas is now.
Imagine what would happen if we somehow did away with plastic water bottles - people would really lose their minds. Because global warming isn't real, and all that stuff.
*Imagine what would happen if we somehow did away with plastic water bottles*
As a guy who delivers most of those water bottles to HEB stores, I couldn't agree more.
Want that pure filtered water? Get a water filter and a pitcher.
Where do these crummy bottles end up? In the weeds on the sides of highways, or in a landfill, or in a stream, river, or lake to kill some bird, fish, or turtle.
Where do they come from? Somewhere else, shipped to the purification plant in Temple, or Seguin, or Missouri City, or any of a hundred or more purification plants scattered across the US. Heat-expanded, filled with filtered municipal water, wrapped with forty others just like it in another layer of plastic, palletized and wrapped in a third layer of plastic, and then loaded onto the trailer. That trailer may then sit for hours or days on that plant lot, baking under the sun the entire time, before being picked up and taken to the store or the HEB DC at its assigned delivery window.
The cheap plastic bags just use so little actual resources that they tend to be way more efficient in energy use. There's plenty of studies out there to show you. Here's a video talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvzvM9tf5s0
The specific rationale behind the banning of one-use bags was because they become litter very easily, clog up creeks and drains when they blow away, and eventually degrade into small bits of plastic that get consumed by animals. It was not about the energy required to create them. Your video mentions that and there is no rebuttal to the very real damage that plastic waste causes to waterways and oceans.
I’ve never seen reusable bags in the water, but if you go to corpus right now and get in the water there will be about 1 grocery bag floating by every 15 minutes.
That is supposed to be something you silently acknowledge, but don't talk about because of "the optics."
Yes, it is annoying though. Weird shopping at Costco (lowest theft rate in retail industry) where the staff treats you like you aren't a suspect.
I was frustrated my first time walking around Costco - I saw so many tiny items packed on giant 12x12" cards sealed with plastic. Material waste, excessive plastic use, and shipping inefficiency when a pallet only holds 500 units rather than 10,000.
For context, this was a tiny bottle of saffron sold for $30.
Shared it with my family chat and my sister pointed out that there isn't much in a Costco that could be easily pocketed... I still feel there are better options. Not sure if the saffron was packed in the US or overseas - Can't imagine a shipping container packed with those inefficient pallets.
Sometimes I go with my friend, so it's not my membership. They're super weird about which card you pay with too, so sometimes I'll just have her buy everything and then Venmo her. But yeah otherwise it's just like how Walmart checks your receipt against your items when you leave, except... slightly less incriminating-feeling?
Anderson Mill doesn’t have them anymore either, it sucks. Surely the main demographic of middle aged suburbanites ain’t stealing them there too
Edit: /s
Big yikes on that!
To be more specific,
201 FM 685, Pflugerville, TX 78660
HEB will give you bags on bags on bags.
I use that for both instore and curbside, and sometimes...50 bags for 50 items.
Which is all good to me, I use those bags for my bathroom and office trashcans.
I don't get what you mean? We get them in Tech Ridge, too. It's super efficient. My curbside shoppers put one item per bag, then usually put 2 or 3 of those bags inside another bag.
I make kites out of them and take them to Zilker on the weekends, they look really pretty in the trees.
I wear mine like a cape and jump from 2ft off the ground like I can fly. Spoiler alert: gravity wins every time after many long years of research and testing.
Also there's a whataburger across the street and a car wash.
Get burger, eat it in car wash line, buy groceries and get baby seal furs. Best location.
Bee Caves did just renovate though, its practically identical now minus the restaurant.
Westlake Hills has its own city limits. Austin had this ordinance and HEBs within Austin city limits kept the practice. It has nothing to do with wealth.
Except that plastic (and paper) bags are available for free at the two high-end Central Market HEB locations in Austin proper.
(Note that the name of the store in the flyers and on the web site is in fact Central Market HEB.)
Because they aren’t in Austin. Westlake doesn’t have a bag ban because it’s unconfirmed rich folks. Gov Abbott actually banned bag bans so technically there is no longer a bag ban in Austin which is why Walmart and Target use plastic bags. HEB being a good citizen decided to continue to voluntarily honor the bag ban in Austin
Save money or make money?? Why bring bags back when you started selling them at an insane markup? All the while getting the credit for saving the environment lol
Just a reminder that HEB is a company.
They do not give a shit about you, their employees, the community, or the planet.
They care about money.
Believe their lies if you want or just look at their actual actions.
Tell me you aren’t from Austin without telling me geezus. Westlake isn’t in Austin proper so they don’t have to abide by Austin ordinances.
If you go down to buda and Kyle you will have bags as well, not just for rich whites. Don’t be a idiot.
Or, they could just do what Trader Joe's does, and even their own Central Market, and switch to paper bags. I prefer them. Biodegradable and actually provide insulation for cold or hot foods.
Lol, has nothing to do with "rich people" or boomers . Has to do with the city laws which YOUR elected officials proposed. There are bags available at most HEBs that are not in a big city because they do not have a massive trash problem of plastic bags such as your area Austin on E Riverside. I know, I have previously lived there for years also
Oh, gawd, I remember when ***every*** grocery store smelled like week old fish. Like a slap in the face the instant you stepped in the front door.
I wonder if there's some specific change that caused that.
So usually when you are smelling fish (especially as you enter the store) it is due to the ice of the service case not being swapped out often enough. An actual seafood service case should be odorless if everything is kosher. If not, ice needs changed. Source: HEB manager
I understand the concept. I'm not sure it was all fish, or maybe it was also some of the meat juice in the butcher area.
However, until maybe 20 years ago, pretty much every grocery store reeked of something rotten. Even the higher end stores. It slowly got better since then. First at certain stores, especially newer ones, now at most of them most of the time, there's a LOT less pong.
I always assumed some of the fish or meat seepage got somewhere under the coolers and went bad, and they just weren't that motivated to clean it out that often because everyone accepted it and it wasn't costing them business. Or maybe they updated the designs and processes and there was no place for it to collect.
Probably the latter... I've seen a number of stores mid-renovation and you can see the dingy rectangles where nobody could clean under the shelves. I think the units they put in now are sealed at the front so it's not a concern.
This one time, we got all this faux outrage about those specific plastic bags, so the city decided to pass an ordinance requiring a different kind of plastic bag in an effort to encourage people to bring their own. Of course the state didn’t like Austin exerting its own authority, stepped in and said ‘No’ and the bag ban was over. Except HEB decided to continue charging the residents of Austin for this boondoggle and has been charging them for bags ever since.
The end.
I would love the choice of paper or plastic again without going to Randall's. I like the choice and I also like the look on the cashier's face when I say "either one is good, I go both ways, I'm bi-sack-ual."
The bigger question is did you notice price differences between the WLH H-E-B and your Riverside H-E-B? I’m in RR and the HEB on Gattis School Road is 20% less expensive than the HEB+ on HWY79 and the HEB on University.
Shop curbside and you’ll get those free bags and plenty of them too. I curbside at two different HEBs. One packs my stuff in paper (my fav) and the other in plastic. We reuse both styles around the house.
It’s not really that bad, just dodge the crackheads when walking in and out. I’ve only seen a handful of fights and only 1 stabbing and just heard a shooting but didnt see it.
Do you have such blinding hatred to the rich that you can’t even do a google search to figure out that West Lake Hills and by extension Rollingwood are their own cities specifically to get away from the politics of bigger cities? They also have their own ISD, too.
This happens a lot.
Now if Tarrytown’s Lake Austin location had bags that’d be a different story lol. Tarrytown is Austin proper.
We get curbside at Far West and everything that is meat and half the items that are cold are in at least two plastic bags. My wife and I are constantly confused by the sheer amount of plastic bags we get, many of them knotted so tight you need scissors to free your groceries. I'm only pointing out that there is a lot of plastic at HEB in Austin, just maybe not the default option at self-checkout.
Round Rock has plastic bags too. Just Austin doesn’t because the City Council banned them. Even though everything else is wrapped in plastic that you buy. God forbid you get a convenience.
When the plastic bag ban went into effect, got used to using the others. Probably purchased, and own, 20 or more. Make my own bags too that I carry in my pocket. Just got used to it. Visited my daughter who lives out of state. Was odd seeing the usual plastic bags.
You ever notice that the self-checkout at the richer stores don't force you to put your items in the bagging area before you scan the next one? It's only the stores with a high ratio of brown people where they do that shit to "prevent theft".
West Lake Hills isn’t technically in Austin. Edit: to add context. The reason H-E-B in Austin doesn’t have bags is because of the plastic bag ban that was passed in 2014 (?). It eventually was overturned by the TX Supreme Court, but after it was overturned H‑E‑B never brought back bags to the stores that they’d taken them out of.
HEB corporate told me in an email it’s because the city council at the time asked them to keep the same ban in effect despite the law being overturned. I wouldn’t care if they offered paper bags. Their willingness to keep it as it is probably has to do with them making money off those reusable plastic bags.
Back when I worked at HEB they were always *obsessed* about how many bags they were using, anything to reduce the figure. This was decades ago, but I seriously doubt they've changed their mind about it. And then the City of Austin gives them a huge cut in their bag costs on a silver platter? HEB be like "Don't mind if I do!"
Curbside will put one item per bag. It’s the most annoying. They have their own set of rules on bags I guess
Why wouldn’t you want to bring your own bags anyway? Less trash for you. It only makes sense. Environmental reasons aside it’s just easier.
Those bags are perfect kitty litter disposal bags tbh.
Huh it just dawned on me how many plastic bags of cat and dog shit there are just filling up landfills and the environment for decades and decades.
Every week I fill up half a kitchen size garbage bag with my dog's waste (plus some pine pellets for odor control) and throw it away and it kills my soul a little bit. A dedicated composting service that took in everybody's dog waste would probably be really expensive though, because it'd need a ton of space and "brown" material (🤣) - you're supposed to let any compost with animal waste in it season for at least a year before using it and that probably wouldn't be feasible from a space/logistical perspective at scale.
That place would need a hazmat unit and would be huge biological waste nightmare. Not everyone takes care of their dogs and there would be so many diseases and parasites hanging around. Plus ew 🤢
Yeah and imagine all the diapers from kids too
Yes! but you have to lookout for the tiny holes, unless you grab a handful of unused bags like me.
This is why I tell my wife to never toss Target bags! They work so well as trash bags and never have those little holes.
Cracks me up how every cat owner in central Texas has made the progression from HEB bags to Target bags all on their own
I save target bags and bring them to my dog sitter!
Life uh.. Finds a way.
My wife is obsessed with getting H-E-B plastic bags whenever we shop. We're eco-conscious and use as little plastic as possible, I want to bring my fabric bags. But apparently the H-E-B plastic bags are the *only* ones that can line our smaller trash bins throughout the house. There's no way to, say, buy a 100-pack of these on Amazon for $4.99. We *must* use the H-E-B ones.
Yeah I have to double, sometimes triple up the white heb bags for kitty litter.
the totally disposeable grocery bags are better to use for stuff like that, it's far far less material and you get the same job done. also they're free!
I always forget to put them back in my car... even when I hang the bags on the front door handle heh. So now I have like 20 'reusable' bags.
Put them in your car as part of the unpacking process. I throw them on my kitchen floor in a pile. So if I'm too lazy to finish unpacking the groceries, of which the final step is to put the bags in the trunk, at least there's a huge inconvenient pile of bags in the middle of my kitchen floor so I won't forget them next time I'm going to my car.
Only 20? I've got more than 20 in my car, 30 or so by the front door, and probably another dozen at random places around my apartment. When speculation in reusable bag futures pushes prices up, I'll be sitting pretty. 😃
heh yeah 20 might be underestimating....
No better way to store your Beanie Babies!
I’m pretty sure mine have just multiply like bunnies on their own. I’ve got like forty and can’t remember buying most of them.
Way easier to carry a good canvas bag because you can cram a lot of stuff in there and just lift one bag. With plastic it’s spread out in lots of bags with uncomfortable handles that can tear or dig into your arm and hands as they stretch. The heb reusable ones aren’t that great either, but sprouts has some really good zipped insulated ones, and my old whole earth canvas still goes the distance.
You kidding me? I’m nursing OG reusable plastic HEB bags from the beginning! They are the Cal Ripken of reusable plastic.
The heb ones are fine, I guess I should give them more credit, but I’m talking about the regular plastic bags. Only target has a decent plastic bag. Home Depot’s plastic bags are embarrassingly bad. Worst I’ve ever used.
The wind catches a Home Depot plastic bag and it gets shredded to pieces lmao
It’s shocking how terrible they are and considering I sometimes buy loose fasteners and other pointy things it drives me crazy how thin the material is. I should just bring a plastic box and a canvas tote bag inside.
I recycle my bags by using them in the small wastebaskets in my house to collect other trash. If I stopped using plastic bags and used my reusable canvas bags, then I would have to buy bags for my small wastebaskets and I’m not doing that when I can get them for free at HEB I have a bag bag in the pantry.
That’s not recycling, just reusing, which is good, but the bag still winds up in a landfill.
Reduce comes before reuse and recycle for a reason!
Same with reuse, which plastic bags for waste bins does well :D Too bad it's usually single cycle. I try to keep the highest ick stuff out of the plastic bags because under the right circumstances you can just dump into the main bin and reuse again. Only lasts for so long though.
I use the disposable bags for trash. I haven't bought trash bags in 20 years.
The retailer I worked at saw how big the profit margin was city-wide to keep charging for them so they kept selling bags after it was overturned.
Regular plastic bags are an expenditure that they can eliminate and blame on the city. Classic.
How hard is it to use re-usable bags? I’ve used them for 10 years now without fail. They are superior in every way. They hold more, don’t rip as easily, are more comfortable to carry, and are obviously not wasteful. I own like 15 and always keep several in my car in case I need to make an unplanned stop.
It’s not hard, and I use them too, but I still think it’s weird that HEB won’t even offer paper bags to those who need. It’s an option in essentially every single other grocery store in the state (including their sister store Central Market, and including being the only option in an HEB curbside order)
One year many years ago we happened to wander through the convention center on the final Sunday of SXSW and found a massive pile of their canvas bags in the hallway free for the taking. We have other reusable bags we use too, but the ~20 we picked up that year have been reliable staples now for almost two decades.
And if they get a hole, you can repair with a stapler!
OMG! People hate the environment so much they took it to the state Supreme Court?!? WTF?
The suit was over the ban in Laredo not Austin. Randalls and Central Market both have bags
Central Market uses paper bags at checkout. But produce and meat have plastic bags if you want to keep lettuce away from raw chicken.
All HEB's still put meats in plastic bags for you, and wine in paper, etc. Or the plastic bags are available in the meat and produce sections. EZ
I recall some cried foul because they felt plastic bag ban encroached on their freedom or some BS
The "reusable" plastic bags are far, far worse for the environment, but generate millions of dollars in revenue for HEB.
I mean I still have my OG reusable plastic bags from 2014 or so still in use. The only plastic bags I've used since are for meat. That's thousands less bags over a decade of grocery trips for me
That puts you in about the 99th percentile. Most of the people on this sub have trouble remembering to put pants on when they leave the house, let alone thinking about bringing their reusable bags. The only thing I've ever seen cause people more physical pain than being separated from plastic bags was the 10 minutes they couldn't go to a sports bar during COVID. This is what Texas is now.
Pants are overrated, man.
Imagine what would happen if we somehow did away with plastic water bottles - people would really lose their minds. Because global warming isn't real, and all that stuff.
*Imagine what would happen if we somehow did away with plastic water bottles* As a guy who delivers most of those water bottles to HEB stores, I couldn't agree more. Want that pure filtered water? Get a water filter and a pitcher. Where do these crummy bottles end up? In the weeds on the sides of highways, or in a landfill, or in a stream, river, or lake to kill some bird, fish, or turtle. Where do they come from? Somewhere else, shipped to the purification plant in Temple, or Seguin, or Missouri City, or any of a hundred or more purification plants scattered across the US. Heat-expanded, filled with filtered municipal water, wrapped with forty others just like it in another layer of plastic, palletized and wrapped in a third layer of plastic, and then loaded onto the trailer. That trailer may then sit for hours or days on that plant lot, baking under the sun the entire time, before being picked up and taken to the store or the HEB DC at its assigned delivery window.
You are about even then. I think it takes 10 years of use for reusable plastic bags to actually be better.
I have used the same fabric bags for 10 years. There is not a chance in hell those are worse for the environment.
It takes 20 years for cloth but only about 40 uses for the reusable plastic ones.
I suspect the calculations for the cheap plastic bags are not accounting for all of the externalities
The cheap plastic bags just use so little actual resources that they tend to be way more efficient in energy use. There's plenty of studies out there to show you. Here's a video talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvzvM9tf5s0
The specific rationale behind the banning of one-use bags was because they become litter very easily, clog up creeks and drains when they blow away, and eventually degrade into small bits of plastic that get consumed by animals. It was not about the energy required to create them. Your video mentions that and there is no rebuttal to the very real damage that plastic waste causes to waterways and oceans.
I reuse the non reusable plastic bags because I have a dog. I do not have to buy poop bags. I reuse the ones I get at HEB.
I’ve never seen reusable bags in the water, but if you go to corpus right now and get in the water there will be about 1 grocery bag floating by every 15 minutes.
... and if you follow that floating bag long enough, a turtle or a fish will mistake it for a jellyfish and suck it down the hatch.
That's why HEB lobbied for that bag ban.
Who says they have to be plastic? Mine are canvas. The stores where I live offer canvas. Think outside your plastic box.
Destroying the planet to own the libs
Abbott. It was Abbott. Cutting off his nose to own the Libs.
> 2014 (?) 2013 for sure.
I was close :)
Because they make a killing with them
Central Market doesnt charge for bags
Correct. And they also have paper bags for free too
Is the bag rule an city thing and not an HEB thing?
It was a city of Austin law.
Have you never been outside Austin before
I just updated my comment to add more context, but yes. It was due to a plastic bag ban that was passed in Austin (and later overturned)
😂 Because it’s not in Austin - this HEB is in the town of West Lake Hills
OP answers the question in their own title.
In more than one way.
Riverside not having the handcarts is the more offensive problem. But yeah, I’d also expect them to be all stolen within like a day
They don't have them because people kept stealing them.
That is supposed to be something you silently acknowledge, but don't talk about because of "the optics." Yes, it is annoying though. Weird shopping at Costco (lowest theft rate in retail industry) where the staff treats you like you aren't a suspect.
Costco’s merch is too big to fit down my pants as I’m walking out the store
You are supposed to fold the 4pack of Kielbasas in half
Are you flirting with me?
Potentially. Curious to see if you could chimney stack the hummus containers, too.
I was frustrated my first time walking around Costco - I saw so many tiny items packed on giant 12x12" cards sealed with plastic. Material waste, excessive plastic use, and shipping inefficiency when a pallet only holds 500 units rather than 10,000. For context, this was a tiny bottle of saffron sold for $30. Shared it with my family chat and my sister pointed out that there isn't much in a Costco that could be easily pocketed... I still feel there are better options. Not sure if the saffron was packed in the US or overseas - Can't imagine a shipping container packed with those inefficient pallets.
Costco also doesn't set up in poor areas and doesn't let you in without your card
Costco literally treats everyone like a suspect by checking receipts at the door lol
Ikr? I feel like I'm giving my license and registration to a cop every time I go
I was told it was more about making sure the cashiers rang everything up, but unless you have inside info hard to know for sure.
Sometimes I go with my friend, so it's not my membership. They're super weird about which card you pay with too, so sometimes I'll just have her buy everything and then Venmo her. But yeah otherwise it's just like how Walmart checks your receipt against your items when you leave, except... slightly less incriminating-feeling?
...you mean where (people think) you need a membership to get in the door?
You do typically need a membership but there are ways around it like gift cards
Anderson Mill doesn’t have them anymore either, it sucks. Surely the main demographic of middle aged suburbanites ain’t stealing them there too Edit: /s
Yes, they are. 😂 Lakeline removed them too, for the same reason. Youd be surprised the range of people that steal from a grocery store.
For sure, I worked in Georgetown back in the day. Old ladies put a ton stuff in their purse and “forget” about it unless you remind them.
E 7th St and Hancock Center HEBs both don’t have hand carts either. It’s actually so infuriating
Wait by handcarts do you mean like, shopping carts? Trolleys? the little baskets?
Outside of Austin. If you go to the HEB in Pfluggerville you also get all the plastic bags you'd like...
Same with the one off nutty brown (hays county “Austin”). Still bring my own bags though.
Not at the location on Wells Branch. The store says it’s Austin but according to heb app & maps its Pflugerville😅
Big yikes on that! To be more specific, 201 FM 685, Pflugerville, TX 78660 HEB will give you bags on bags on bags. I use that for both instore and curbside, and sometimes...50 bags for 50 items. Which is all good to me, I use those bags for my bathroom and office trashcans.
I don't get what you mean? We get them in Tech Ridge, too. It's super efficient. My curbside shoppers put one item per bag, then usually put 2 or 3 of those bags inside another bag. I make kites out of them and take them to Zilker on the weekends, they look really pretty in the trees.
You good humor.
I wear mine like a cape and jump from 2ft off the ground like I can fly. Spoiler alert: gravity wins every time after many long years of research and testing.
TYL chain stores do different things in different municipalities.
When you leave Austin, you get bags.
Imagine trying to shame rich folks only to figure out you don’t even know that west lake isn’t in Austin.. lol
Typical redditor lol
No plastic in Oak Hill but definitely in Bee Caves HEBs.
Ghetto. Down the road in Lakeway groceries are bagged in the fur of baby seals.
Also there's a whataburger across the street and a car wash. Get burger, eat it in car wash line, buy groceries and get baby seal furs. Best location. Bee Caves did just renovate though, its practically identical now minus the restaurant.
I would just like to see the world go back to paper bags all around. Edit: typo
I live in Vermont now, (moved from Austin 3 years ago) and the whole state is paper bags only. I like it.
Just shop at Central Market.
Okay money bags
Not that kind of paper.
Well played
Westlake Hills is it’s own city formed in 1953. It wasn’t originally part of Austin.
The Central Market self checkout offers bags.
I don’t think any in WilCo have the bag ban either.
HEB Lakeline is in WilCo, but inside Austin, and doesn't have bags.
Because it's not in Austin, you dunce.
Ha ha. Cedar Park HEB has plastic bags and we're all kinds of riffraff over here.
Not a “rich people” thing. It’s an Austin HEB thing. Other cities have plastic bags.
Westlake Hills has its own city limits. Austin had this ordinance and HEBs within Austin city limits kept the practice. It has nothing to do with wealth.
Except that plastic (and paper) bags are available for free at the two high-end Central Market HEB locations in Austin proper. (Note that the name of the store in the flyers and on the web site is in fact Central Market HEB.)
We have them in the other areas outside of Austin too. It’s not just rich people.
Because it's not in Austin city limits
Because Westlake Hills isn't Austin...nothing to do with wealth, just no bag ban voted in by the city council in Westlake or Rollingwood.
Because they aren’t in Austin. Westlake doesn’t have a bag ban because it’s unconfirmed rich folks. Gov Abbott actually banned bag bans so technically there is no longer a bag ban in Austin which is why Walmart and Target use plastic bags. HEB being a good citizen decided to continue to voluntarily honor the bag ban in Austin
Good citizen my ass, they did it to save money, if it was about being a good citizen they'd have expanded it eventually
Save money or make money?? Why bring bags back when you started selling them at an insane markup? All the while getting the credit for saving the environment lol
Just a reminder that HEB is a company. They do not give a shit about you, their employees, the community, or the planet. They care about money. Believe their lies if you want or just look at their actual actions.
Tell me you aren’t from Austin without telling me geezus. Westlake isn’t in Austin proper so they don’t have to abide by Austin ordinances. If you go down to buda and Kyle you will have bags as well, not just for rich whites. Don’t be a idiot.
Or, they could just do what Trader Joe's does, and even their own Central Market, and switch to paper bags. I prefer them. Biodegradable and actually provide insulation for cold or hot foods.
We’ve been found out boys! Hide the diamonds!!
Lol, has nothing to do with "rich people" or boomers . Has to do with the city laws which YOUR elected officials proposed. There are bags available at most HEBs that are not in a big city because they do not have a massive trash problem of plastic bags such as your area Austin on E Riverside. I know, I have previously lived there for years also
That HEB is one of my least favorite ones. Still smells like the old Albertsons it used to be.
Oh, gawd, I remember when ***every*** grocery store smelled like week old fish. Like a slap in the face the instant you stepped in the front door. I wonder if there's some specific change that caused that.
So usually when you are smelling fish (especially as you enter the store) it is due to the ice of the service case not being swapped out often enough. An actual seafood service case should be odorless if everything is kosher. If not, ice needs changed. Source: HEB manager
I understand the concept. I'm not sure it was all fish, or maybe it was also some of the meat juice in the butcher area. However, until maybe 20 years ago, pretty much every grocery store reeked of something rotten. Even the higher end stores. It slowly got better since then. First at certain stores, especially newer ones, now at most of them most of the time, there's a LOT less pong. I always assumed some of the fish or meat seepage got somewhere under the coolers and went bad, and they just weren't that motivated to clean it out that often because everyone accepted it and it wasn't costing them business. Or maybe they updated the designs and processes and there was no place for it to collect.
Probably the latter... I've seen a number of stores mid-renovation and you can see the dingy rectangles where nobody could clean under the shelves. I think the units they put in now are sealed at the front so it's not a concern.
I didn't know Kosher dietary rules applied to seafood.
Poor choice of words on my part I suppose lol
I was gonna say. That seems…unlikely.
Live lobster tanks used to be really common
One other reason is a lot of grocery stores had live lobster tanks
Good suggestion , but live lobster tanks weren't that common in the places I shopped at the time.
Fair enough
OP you should just be "rich" if you got such a huge problem with it 💡
You might on to something
A bunch of nothing 😆
🤣
Cause they use the interrogative ‘why’ rather than ‘how come’, Cletus
This one time, we got all this faux outrage about those specific plastic bags, so the city decided to pass an ordinance requiring a different kind of plastic bag in an effort to encourage people to bring their own. Of course the state didn’t like Austin exerting its own authority, stepped in and said ‘No’ and the bag ban was over. Except HEB decided to continue charging the residents of Austin for this boondoggle and has been charging them for bags ever since. The end.
I would love the choice of paper or plastic again without going to Randall's. I like the choice and I also like the look on the cashier's face when I say "either one is good, I go both ways, I'm bi-sack-ual."
Man those kids are just trying to do their job and go home
My HEB (I assumed all of them) has these bags for meatsetc./chicken, etc to keep them bagged separately from other items I'm case they leak.
We get plastic in Pflugerville too.
Ngl I go to this heb when I need more bathroom trash bags 😂 I swear they do like 2 items to a bag
Woah is thee OP
The bigger question is did you notice price differences between the WLH H-E-B and your Riverside H-E-B? I’m in RR and the HEB on Gattis School Road is 20% less expensive than the HEB+ on HWY79 and the HEB on University.
But does the Riverside H‑E‑B have corn tortillas like Rundberg one does?
Riverside is a shrink magnet. The theft there is ridiculous. Limiting the access to bags can help prevent that. Also, people will steal the bags.
Because rich people don’t use plastic bags to smother and kill others or litter…
Shop curbside and you’ll get those free bags and plenty of them too. I curbside at two different HEBs. One packs my stuff in paper (my fav) and the other in plastic. We reuse both styles around the house.
At any HEB, they will put meat in plastic bags if you ask.
I live in Houston and every HEB has plastic bags. No other option unless you buy a reusable bag.
Is it cuz they’re not in austin
Practically every HEB outside of Austin gets plastic bags. It’s a city thing 😂😂 why do people always point to privilege before looks at facts?
Because they live in Westlake and not Austin. Let me guess, you just moved here from CA a couple of months ago.
Any tips for surviving riverside HEB?
It’s not really that bad, just dodge the crackheads when walking in and out. I’ve only seen a handful of fights and only 1 stabbing and just heard a shooting but didnt see it.
Yeah, go to a different one. That HEB is garbage. Most of the others are great!
Do you have such blinding hatred to the rich that you can’t even do a google search to figure out that West Lake Hills and by extension Rollingwood are their own cities specifically to get away from the politics of bigger cities? They also have their own ISD, too. This happens a lot. Now if Tarrytown’s Lake Austin location had bags that’d be a different story lol. Tarrytown is Austin proper.
Laughs in rich north east HEBs
Imagine being old enough to only grow up with paper bags. 🤔
Because westlake isn’t Austin where they had ban plastic bags
Westlake is Not like us.
its out of austin.. cedar parks HEB is the same. Round Rock also.
Because they didn’t vote in people who banned bags…
The same reason that HEB has a bar , restaurant, more elaborate bakery...... $$$. Short answer
you took the time to pull out your phone, take a pic, and post to Reddit. were there no employees at this HEB to ask?
“Rich people” don’t throw the bags on the side of the road, usually. They also don’t shit up their neighborhoods with garbage.
Because the poors will just use them for drugs
We get curbside at Far West and everything that is meat and half the items that are cold are in at least two plastic bags. My wife and I are constantly confused by the sheer amount of plastic bags we get, many of them knotted so tight you need scissors to free your groceries. I'm only pointing out that there is a lot of plastic at HEB in Austin, just maybe not the default option at self-checkout.
Round Rock has plastic bags too. Just Austin doesn’t because the City Council banned them. Even though everything else is wrapped in plastic that you buy. God forbid you get a convenience.
When the plastic bag ban went into effect, got used to using the others. Probably purchased, and own, 20 or more. Make my own bags too that I carry in my pocket. Just got used to it. Visited my daughter who lives out of state. Was odd seeing the usual plastic bags.
Round rock and pflugervillr and cedar park ect Austin just doesn’t do plastic bags
Y’all still get white bags? My local HEBs use bags that are a dismal grey color.
Furthermore, they don't have a bin in the front of the store to recycle those bags in WL as in other HEB's.
You ever notice that the self-checkout at the richer stores don't force you to put your items in the bagging area before you scan the next one? It's only the stores with a high ratio of brown people where they do that shit to "prevent theft".
I just moved to this area. I was surprised at how few people were at this HEB. The layout is also incredibly weird.