One Method for Opening Plastic Grocery Bags

Look to the sides for offset edges that you can easily pull apart.

Photo by Griffin Wooldridge on Unsplash

Ideally, you’ll bring along your reusable bag. But let’s say you forget, and that you are in a position in which you must do your own bagging. Plastic bags may already be waiting for you on a rack, the two layers of film separated and ready to go. But, you may instead be presented with a stack or roll of new, non-separated bags, and it’s your job to pull the sides apart.

This can be a notoriously tricky task. The Internet abounds with suggestions. I wish to offer an approach that does not seem to have attracted much attention. Maybe the bag designs I’ve seen differ from those that others encounter. Or maybe my method is already painfully obvious. But in any case, for what it’s worth, please refer to the following illustration:

Generally, one layer (in the illustration, the bottom) is wider than the other.

In my experience, when the bag is flat, the left and right edges of the two layers are not aligned, but rather, these edges of either the top or the bottom layer stick farther out to the side. These very slightly protruding edges provide flaps, for lack of a better word, that are very narrow, but still possible to grab…