IT’S fascinating seeing the way that we experienced shoppers behave now that plastic bags incur a charge in supermarkets.

You can see that the shopping population is now split into Planners and Reacters. The Planners come with their plastic bags for life tucked under their arms, and the Reacters wait until they reach the till before suddenly accepting that, yes, they actually need a bag for their groceries.

Most of us fall between the two categories and sometimes remember to take the bags with us, but find that at others we’re in the till queue minus bags. For some reason, we definitely don’t want to pay even 5p for a plastic bag; you can even see bagless people juggling with their buys to get them back to the car.

I suppose it’s payback for all those times over the years we laughed at Coronation Street’s Roy Cropper and his shopping bag. Oh how smug we were about the simple soul! Now, we’ve come to realise that Roy’s got it right.