Some British shoppers are avoiding the new 5p plastic bag charge at their local supermarkets by wheeling their trolley home instead, according to a number of trolley-thieving reports on Twitter.
Shoppers have been posting particularly swear-y tweets about their trolley-taking exploits in response to the new 5p bag charge. And it's hard to tell which users are joking and which are taking their plastic bag rage out on trolleys across England.
Paul Griffiths (@paulgrippa) was one of the first, tweeting a photo of a trolley in his front room with the hashtags #nobrainer and #needed6bags. Social media peer pressure appears to have gotten the better of him and he has since returned the trolley.
Supermarkets already have a number of different strategies in place to stop people running off with trolleys, including magnetic wheel locks and narrowly-spaced bollards.
The 5p plastic bag charge, introduced last week, applies to all retailers with more than 250 employees. Its introduction in England follows similar schemes elsewhere in the UK. In 2014 alone 8.5 billion bags were given out in the UK.
England is the last country in the UK to adopt the policy -- plastic bag charges have been active in Wales since 2011, Northern Ireland from 2013 and Scotland from 2014.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
