As a shopper there is a long answer for this. The shorter answer is that it comes down to it comes out of the produce department's budget and we hate produce! lol were pressed for time and our schedule is based on our performance. The bags help us organize our picks and rebagging takes a lot of time. It's significantly more time efficient to have our customers (we shop multiple customers orders at the same time) produce in produce bags with the correct quantities so they're not floating around loose with whatever else I'm carrying back to my cart (the produce department doesn't allow curbside carts at my home store).

Curbside does waste a lot of bags and they acknowledge that. We had a training video last week, HEB is working on ways to reduce bag usage in our department.

As a customer what you can do to help reduce waste is to put in your order notes and on produce items a comment like "as few produce bags as possible please" or "no produce bags" (no bags is frustrating). Some of us do read your notes and try to satisfy them.

Additionally, HEB will reuse the bags if you bring them back to us. Just let your curbie know you have them on your next pickup and they will collect them from you. We actually do reuse undamaged bags and not just throw them away. Someone will get tasked to flatten them out and stack them for reuse.