Where I am the thin bags are quite strong, but all the cashiers are forced to double bag anyway because of that one time it breaks and the customer gets mad. I have to just go along with it instead of bothering them.
When they did the plastic bag ban for grocery stores in California, I immediately went out and bought a case of those thin ones to stick in my car.
They're far stronger and more reliable (even with the overall poorer quality control, which I believe causes the occasional breaks you refer too, easily remedied by conservatively under-filling) than even the best paper bags they're replacing. The handles on those paper bags require such delicate, special handling, and if there's any wetness, well, I'd better have a cart, because I'm not making it to my car no matter how closer I parked.
The case of 1000 takes up very little space in the trunk, lasts me essentially forever, costs way less than the mandatory 10 cents per bag the stores are now required to charge, and, more importantly, is far more sanitary than reusable bags.
It is enough of a challenge to shop for fresh, relatively healthy food and having it last a worthwhile length of time, without worrying about cross-contamination from the last shopping trip.
Sanitary? Are you sticking uncovered pieces of raw meat into the bag? Everything in the store already comes in a package, except possibly produce, which I'd hope you're washing before you eat it anyway.
I don't know where you shop, but I've had plenty of packages (especially food packaged by the store) leak, and even if the ones I bought didn't leak, I often discover dried or partially dried residue on my package from a leak from somewhere else.
My concern isn't so much that I'm at greater risk of a food-borne illness (although there is that, and it's a greater worry now, with the increase in antibiotic resistance driven by driven by agriculture) but of the food spoiling earlier than necessary. This is especially a problem with the produce that you mentioned.
Is there any evidence that merely "washing" produce helps at all with cross-contamination, from a food-borne illness perspective? I imagine it would, if one were to do scrub it with warm, soapy water for at least 20 seconds, but does anyone actually do that? I have never in my life seen that done.
I believe the best practice is just not letting it ever touch raw meat in the first place.
Actually, yes, I absolutely would also have a sanitary issue with eating salad off of panties that had been used to hold raw meat that had merely been tossed in the wash. (Othersie, panties or other clothing are a strawman).
As for my plates, those go in the dishwasher, which uses both a chlorinated detergent and boosts the water temperature to kill bacteria.
I'd surmise that such treatment of nylon or even cotton would reduce the lifespan of those bags. What's worse, I'd have to buy a significant number of them to make sure I had enough on hand for shopping and to run a full machine load when sanitizing them. Good thing that's just not going to happen.
In the early 2000s when I was a grocery sacker, many customers would ask to get their items put in a paper bag and then into a plastic bag so that their paper bag had handles.
I'm so glad that we're seeing a shift to reusable bags and, hopefully, a culture of reusability.
