Mexican elderly lose work as grocery baggers, protest

The coronavirus pandemic and changing consumer habits threaten to put an end to a decades-old practice of allowing elderly people in Mexico to earn extra income as grocery store baggers.

Baggers over 60 had expected to return to stores last month as pandemic restrictions eased in Mexico City. But Walmart de Mexico, the  slot country's biggest retailer, announced this week that they wouldn't be allowed back.

The retail chain said Mexico City's ban on plastic bags and the pandemic meant customers no longer want other people touching their groceries.

“Due to the health emergency, we have seen that our customers want to avoid third parties having contact with their purchases,” Walmart de Mexico said in a statement. “Added to this is the fact that under current law to protect the environment, we have stopped giving free, single-use plastic bags.”

“For this reason, our customers now bring their own reusable bags and they have become used to packing their own purchase,” the statement continued.

Elderly baggers have held a series of protests over the last two weeks outside grocery stores and government offices, holding signs reading “We Want to Work!”

“It's not fair,” former grocery bagger Maria Guadalupe Garcia told the Telediario news program. “I don't have anything other than this.”

Lourdes Cuca put it this way: “I need to work, because it is my emotional support.”

The “jobs” — they are considered “volunteers," not company employees — are hardly lucrative. Some customers give them tips of about one percent of the grocery bill or less, with many just leaving five or ten cents.

In some places in Mexico, teenagers are baggers, but in others the elderly were given spots under a program arranged many years ago with the government's National Institute for the Elderly. Walmart said it had notified the Institute in December that the arrangement would not be renewed.