Carrier bags work good!

A couple or three months ago, I finally fulfilled my pipe dream of obtaining some of the "carrier bags" that the Times makes available to its carriers.

Wierdly, "makes available" is about all that the Times does in this connection. Not only do they not actively promote them. During my first two and a half years of being a paper boy, I never even saw one, and the only evidence to me that they even existed consisted of one vague snippet - A $5.-each "carrier bags" line on the supply sheet. (Not to be expensively confused, although we'd done so once or twice, with the $1.75-per-hundred for the big Sunday version, plastic "sleeves" that we put the papers in). During all that time, I could only guess that they'd probably be cheap canvas shoulder bags similar to a $3.-at-the-flea-market one that - as I vaguely recall boasted in this blog a while back - I'd been regularly using on one of the streets that I do by foot.

For maximum efficiency on the several 8-to-16-house sections that I do by foot, my ideal goal was to have not just one, but several, such bags, and fill them all up with the appropriate numbers of papers at the same time that I'm sticking the front sections in at the distribution center, thereby eliminating the time-consuming extra handling that occurs when I grab armloads. But with the $2. price difference, I thought, why be in any hurry to see about obtainiany of the Times' carrier bags? More $3. canvas shoulder bags might show up at the flea market. The only (or so I thought at the time) thing that I'd be getting by paying the Times $5. instead of some flea market dealer $3., would be having the Times' name on the side of the bag, and the _Times_ ought to pay _me_ for _that_.

So, I kept on only using my one logo-less, green canvas carrier bag that I'd gotten at the flea market for $3., thereby only gleaning some of the above double-handling-saving advantage on one of the streets. That street, incidentally, was usually Hilltop, because that's my longest - 16 houses to be exact; it grew from 15 in May - by-foot segment. The green canvas bag was accommodating 8 or 10 papers depending on the size of the papers that day; I had to always keep the 8-or-10 number in my head until starting the segment, and then grab the appropriate additional number of papers in my arm to make a total of 16.

But then, a couple or three months ago, there happened to be some conversation at the distribution center about these carrier bags that the Times "used to" have. It surfaced that they still can be special-ordered. So, I ordered 4 of them, and finally got them a month or so later (which was a month or so ago).

Nobody other than me, to my knowledge, has obtained any. At least one semi-bigwig asked, as I picked them up, "What are you going to do with them"?

Well am I the only one who does multiple houses away from his motor vehicle, or what?

It turns out that these bags (which, as I suspected, are white with the Times' name on them) are _well_ _worth_ obtaining; the quality of them is much higher than you'd expect for $5.: The straps are padded, they've got red flourescent material, and, _completely_ unexpectedly, I've been able to fit all 16 of Hilltop's papers into any one of them. (Something about the shape of them, which I haven't figured out, slickly accommodates this.) The fatter-than usual, 11/29 edition was the only one so far to be a tight fit.