I'm old enough to remember when supermarkets only had brown paper bags. They were weak and the handles tear off easily, and anything cold will make the bag wet and it will fall apart usually from the bottom. Supermarkets must have spent a lot of money replacing customer's broken items when bags failed even before leaving the store.

So when doing the calculus for brown paper bags don't forget to include the cost goods wasted when they fail.

Thankfully we did the full stupid circle quickly enough that the gray hairs in the paper bag industry remembered this and the current generation of bags lacks the handles so people are forced to carry them from the bottom.

Those are not the brown paper bags the GP was referring to. Those fall under the earlier category of "forgot our reusable bags a couple of times and then got on with it". The ones that are left are to replace "small plastic bags you put fruit or pastries in".

Australian supermarkets have excelled at replicating this paper bag fiasco.

The white plastic bags they replaced are magnitudes of order more durable and able to carry, I should test this, at a guess ten times the weight. Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times.

Fortunately the white plastic bags are still available online (eBay / Amazon / etc) so I just buy 50 for my own use as required and use them till they nearly fall apart then repurpose them as bin liners.

They’re incredibly cheap, don’t really get dirty in an unhygienic way, can be washed if something does spill in them, and they fold up in to almost no space.

I'm old enough to remember when supermarket brown paper bags didn't have handles... Agree with the other commenter that the handles are pointless but the bags work fine if you just ignore them.

Incidentally, given that I'm _not_ old enough to remember a time before supermarkets had plastic bags, either the invention of attaching handles to paper bags took a very long time to migrate to my corner of California, or this comment makes no sense

The handles on brown paper bags are noob traps. You're supposed to hold the bag against your body with one arm, your hand on the bottom of the bag. They work fine like this. I've walked home totaling hundreds if not thousands of miles (two or three times a week for many years) with paper grocery bags like this and never had issues.