Aaron Gilbreath is a writer and editor at Longreads. He’s the author of This Is: Essays on Jazz, the personal essay collection Everything We Don’t Know, and the forthcoming Through the San Joaquin Valley: The Heart of California, and has written for Harper’s, Kenyon Review, and The Dublin Review.
Portland, Oregon, is the latest city to initiate a ban on plastic grocery bags. In celebration of the bag ban, our writer, a Powell’s Books cashier, offers a sampling of responses to his question, “Would you like a bag?”