You grab your canvas tote, feel good about skipping the plastic, and walk into the store ready to shop responsibly. But a 2015 study, ‘BYOB: How Bringing Your Own Shopping Bags Leads to Treating Yourself and the Environment,’ in the Journal of Marketing, found that the reusable bag might also be quietly nudging you towards the cookie aisle. Researchers found that bringing your own bags leads to more purchases of both eco-friendly and indulgent items in the same shopping trip.
The good deed that comes with a side of cookies
According to Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge publication, the researchers tested this by combining real shopping data with lab experiments. For the data part, they analyzed loyalty card data from one California grocery store location, following more than 936,000 purchases from nearly 6,000 households over time.
This design enabled them to compare what the same shopper bought on trips when bringing reusable bags to trips without them, helping to rule out the simpler explanation that 'bag bringers' are simply a different type of shopper altogether.
