A Bag for All Systems: Historicizing Shopping Bags in Eastern European Consumer Culture, 1980–2000

Abstract

Amidst widespread shortages in the 1980s, consumers in late communist-era Eastern Europe strategically carried shopping bags with them everywhere in case an opportunity to pick up scarce goods arose. After 1989, the routine use of reusable string shopping bags declined in favor of single-use plastic bags provided in supermarkets. Over time, however, string bags were widely reconstituted as a popular nostalgic commodity. This paralleled, in reverse, the trajectory of plastic bags, especially those bearing Western branding, which had been desired but scarce commodities in the 1980s before postcommunist reforms rendered them ubiquitous. In this article, I argue that the shopping bag’s function as both an instrument of consumption and a potential commodity in and of itself helps us better historicize how late communist shortage, the rupture of 1989, and the ensuing period of change transformed the perception and memory of the role of material objects in late twentieth-century Eastern Europe. To ascertain how their embedded meaning and social function has been constantly repurposed, I analyze representations of shopping bags in print and media culture from the 1980s and 1990s as well as nostalgic sources created more recently, alongside anecdotes and recollections in academic and commercial texts.