Just Say No

Ok, so it’s not exactly news, but just in case you don’t know the figures, every year we use between 500 billion and one trillion plastic bags (I don’t know if I can even count that high) to cart home all of the junk we buy. And that’s a shame. So next time you go to the store, just say no to their plastic bags.

Because everybody from Decathlon to Body Shop wants to make it easy for you. Muji’s got a slick little nylon shopper that fits into its own (slick little) pouch for 8€ or a bigger sturdier bag that fits into its own clutch for 30€. Body Shop had great canvas bags for just 2.50€ and Decathlon has all sorts of options (the best is the nylon bag for 1.50€ although the hard plastic ball it folds into is a little suspect.) BoPreu supermarkets will discount the price of the normal plastic bags from your purchases if you bring your own.

And of course Ikea, ever ingenious, lets you buy a version of their big plastic bags and even has cute designs for schlepping and totting for .99€. (Calm down, nobody’s forgetting about the traditional options either – the wheelie cart and the straw basket are still as good as ever.) Just remember next time you’re shopping, in Barcelona or anywhere else, to say no to plastic bags!

And the Winner is ...

Before Colette, before Ralph Lauren gave us lifestyle, brands invested in branding, or innovation was innovative, there was Vinçon, bringing us things we didn’t even know we wanted. Now this store specialized in housewears and gifts is almost as much of a landmark in Barcelona as that big rock pile next door and lots of us wait every year to be surprised and tickled by the new Christmas shopping bags. Of course some years are better than others.

That’s why we asked friends and relations to put in their two céntimos about their favourite bags. It wasn’t easy to tally – there have been 48 designs since they started the tradition in 1972 and they’re so good that the votes were all over the map (do the math and you’ll see that some years there were multiple options.)

As a year the overall winner was 2007. So many people loved the calendar and the sweet interpretations of a colander, a bird in a cage, a handbag, an umbrella. But those were different bags. So here are the individual winners:

1975 – the Vin Chong joke had lots of people chuckling.

2007 Calendar – America Sánchez, designer of the original and still-going-strong logo convinced many with the December calendar.

2001 – Pati Núñez, this year’s National Design Prize winner and one of the usual suspects when it comes to Vinçon bags, hit home with her tribute to the peseta as it was on it's way out of circulation. (Remember that they taped a peseta onto each packaged wrapped at the store. Did you wonder how much that cost? Do you think they got a discount since the item was about to become past season?)

Check out this year’s bag and the exhibit of historic shopping bags on the second floor at the store.

Vinçon:
Passeig de Gràcia, 96
tel 93 215 5037
m-sat 10h – 20:30h

In the bag

Of course our home town Vinçon, with their yearly Christmas bag design, is the hands-down world champion of the shopping bag so stores in Barcelona have a lot to live up to on that front. But there are still a few little guys out there who score big on the bag graphics.

The Superservis chain of mini-groceries uses a logo originally created in 1961, when they opened their second store on Calle Avinyó (the first, on Aribau, opened in 1945,) that’s so retro that it still looks great.

Pick up a litre of milk just to get the bag:
Avinyó, 11
Diputación, 178
Ramón y Cajal, 49
Vallirana, 21-23

As a tribute to the cartoonist Cesc, the owners of the French bookstore Llibreria Jaimes, longtime friends of the artist (he made the birth announcements for the founder’s grandchildren,) have brought back his drawings from the 1940’s originally made for the paper then used to wrap purchases . Now on their shopping bags, they feature the surroundings of both their stores, including the historic and iconic sights of Paseo de Gracia and the buses that will take you to their store on Drs. Trias i Pujol.

Brush up on your French or get a guide for your next trip to Paris:
Paseo de Gracia, 64
Drs. Trias i Pujol, 7