What Makes Customers Bring Their Bags or Buy Bags from the Shop?: A Survey of Customers at a Taiwan Hypermarket

The Taiwan government had implemented a restriction policy to cut down the overuse of plastic shopping bags. Under this policy, hypermarkets and many other stores are prohibited from offering free plastic shopping bags. They can only sell them. This study was aimed to use a set of psychological and situational variables to predict customer's bag-use behaviors, which included bringing one's own bag and buying bags from the hypermarket. The predictors were attitude toward the behavior, environmental concern, and personal norm (or ACN); self-efficacy of bringing bags; self-efficacy of not requesting bags; response efficacy; and situational variables. Results showed that our model could predict both bag-bringing and bag-buying behaviors. Self-efficacy of bringing bags was the main variable that determined whether customers would bring their bags to shopping, whereas situational variables determined whether customers would buy bags. Implications of these results and suggestions for the policy practices are discussed.