The shopping bag has made some career leaps in the past few years.

The youngest is happening these days.

This is due to the fact that paper is scarce, just like some things are currently in short supply, wood, bicycles, entertainment electronics.

Less paper means fewer shopping bags, and fewer shopping bags mean that the shopping bag that is used more than once and is crumpled up on the hallway shelf is now even more indispensable.

Jennifer Wiebking

Editor in the "Life" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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Sure, it has not been so lightly asked about the bag for a long time.

Bags have long been considered wasteful.

If they are provided with the logos of luxury brands, they can achieve corresponding prices on eBay - five Hermès bags, for example, can currently be bought there at a price of 50 euros.

After all, they are made of the ultimate luxury material - paper.

On the other hand, even the supermarket chains abolished plastic bags half an eternity ago, in the middle of the last decade.

That was crucial for the shopping bag.

From then on, the branches, which, regardless of where in Germany, are always set up identically, were a bit more individualistic.

The contents of handbags were already the subject of the sociologist;

Researchers would be

up to date

if they asked women and men what exactly this or that jute bag means to them, where the slightly frayed raffia bag comes from, what they want to say about the cloth bag with the emblem of the New York bookstore.

Yes, there is even the designer shopping bag.

Beginning of the era of the IT shopping bag

The British bag designer Anya Hindmarch heralded something like the era of the It shopping bag in 2007. When everyone was still unsuspectingly packing several bags per receipt at the checkout, she and the supermarket chain Sainsbury's brought out the “I'm Not A Plastic bag” cloth bag. Cost point five pounds sterling. People were queuing for the bag, it should have been 80,000 on the first day. Celebrities adorned themselves with this early form of eco-fashion statement. There were copies. And it only took a few months for the American organic supermarket chain Whole Foods to join.

Hindmarch still sells the bags, now also made of a material in which 32 half-liter plastic bottles are processed per bag, for 800 euros each.

By the way, for a tenth of them there is one from the young label the paperbag.

It is made of a particularly robust cellulose latex material.

Visually, it is reminiscent of the good old paper bag.

In practice, it is always in use.