I explained myself. In my opinion, the owner doesn’t really care, and also there’s despair without knowledge.
This isn’t a price the owner set; it’s a law meant to moderate excessive use of plastic bags. There’s some indication of intent in the fact that chains said in the past they would donate this income. On the face of it, this seems like negligible income they weren’t interested in to begin with, and it’s not likely they care about it after the fact. They also certainly know that it’s hard to estimate the number of bags before packing, and they just give up.

None of those considerations has anything to do with it. You’re stealing.

I was delighted to see this sensational innovation about despair without knowledge in theft. Despair without knowledge in theft is the precise description of what is called stealing: taking quietly so the owner won’t know, and then there will be despair without knowledge.

Just for the sake of “and you shall be clear,” I try to estimate on the high side, and I’ve certainly paid over the years for many more bags than I actually used. I wrote that the solution is simple.
But I don’t bother carefully calculating every 10 agorot against every bag, and I was interested in knowing what the Jewish law is.
I thought you’d explain more why those considerations are irrelevant (or perhaps they are relevant).
Apparently it seems too foolish to you 🤷.

That’s really not what I meant by despair without knowledge. Come on…
The whole bag-charge arrangement was from the start perceived as not serious and hard to implement. There’s even a sketch about it in “Checkout” (I’m sure you’ll write something like how nice it is that people learn Jewish law from comedy sketches).

The term despair without knowledge has a very well-defined meaning in Jewish law. It’s hard to understand a concept when you use it in a way that isn’t its meaning.
There is no permission to steal from someone because you estimate that he doesn’t care. By the same logic, you could say the chain doesn’t care if you take a box of matches and don’t pay. So that’s not theft? What kind of idea is that?!
If the chain wants to donate from its income, let it donate. That doesn’t mean you can make sure it donates to you. And if the chain donates 1,000 shekels to someone, can you steal merchandise worth 1,000 shekels? Does something like that really need to be explained?
And of course there is also the law of the land, meaning state law.
If this is hard for you, take enough bags that will certainly suffice, or use reusable shopping bags. That’s best.

Understood. Thanks!
I’ll explain the initial thought:
It may be more correct simply to say “despair” without the “without knowledge.” What I meant was that the way bags are charged is such that certainly a nontrivial portion of the bags are taken without payment, and therefore even if the owner isn’t consciously thinking about it, there is despair. I now see that this isn’t a good argument. Maybe plain despair would have been better.
As for caring, I meant this: there are things a person doesn’t care about and it’s permitted to take them (like a splinter from a pile of wood), but I definitely understand that here, when the item is being offered for sale (even though I tried to question that, formally it certainly is being offered for sale), it isn’t comparable.
I mentioned the charity issue explicitly only as some indication of intent, when we already have reasonable suspicion that the owner has little interest in payment for bags. The example you gave with the 1,000 shekels just doesn’t relate to what I said.
As for the law of the land, that’s why I wrote that the purpose of the law is ecological, and surely inaccuracy in the estimate before packing won’t make much difference. But again, I understand the side that would refute this; I’m not an anarchist.
And as stated, in any case I’m certainly paying well above what I owe; all this was only for Torah study and resolving doubts.
May you be sealed for a good year!

How is this theft if there’s no loss to the owner? After all, the cost of one bag is much less than 10 agorot. And before the bag law, the owner didn’t charge money for bags, so from his perspective this also isn’t really something he’s selling for profit. And presumably there’s also waiver here for someone who does this unintentionally (that is, gives a random estimate of the number of bags).

And I also forgot that we’re talking here about less than a perutah, and if I remember correctly there is no theft at all with less than a perutah.

First, you’re assuming the discussion is about a single bag. So can someone steal a million dollars one bag at a time?
Second, regarding less than a perutah, see here: https://minchasasher.com/he/shiur/%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%A9%D7%94-%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%92%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%91%D7%94-%D7%95%D7%92%D7%96%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%94-%D7%A4%D7%97%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%9E%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%A4-%D7%AA%D7%A9%D7%A2%D7%95/

After the law, he is indeed offering it for sale. Coerced sale in reverse. And if we assume the owner does his pricing calculations accordingly, then once he charges for bags there may be a change in the prices of the products themselves. You’re assuming the law only improved the seller’s situation. But he lowers prices as much as he can because of competition.

As far as I’m concerned, the matter has been clarified. Just one note: to say that the owner factors the price of the bags into the pricing of the products and changes the product prices accordingly is completely far-fetched. For each bag, products are bought whose value ranges from tens to hundreds of shekels. In supermarkets, people almost never buy really tiny purchases, and then in four or five bags there’s usually between 400 and 1,000 shekels’ worth.
It simply seems obvious to me that the price of the bags is not a factor in the owner’s eyes.

I’ve never run a business, but it seems obvious to me that you’re mistaken. The chain owner isn’t talking about one bag. He’s doing calculations on millions of bags. As a reminder, they also sell matches. And when many people don’t pay for bags, that becomes part of the calculation. Instead of the price of those bags, he could lower the price of a product sold in moderate quantity by five shekels. That’s significant in a chain like this. After all, they operate on profit margins and competition at those scales.

Maybe we should open a responsa category called “Business Management.”
I also haven’t run a supermarket yet. But it seems much more reasonable—if not simply obvious—that product pricing is done relative to the cost price of each item, not by some global calculation of all the store’s products.
Even if the owners were calculating the sale of millions of bags, that would necessarily point to the pricing of tens of millions of products, each one costing at least tens of times more than the price of a bag. It’s completely negligible, and very forced to say that this has any effect on the prices of the many expensive products that go into a single bag. (Reminder: a million bags—which contained tens of millions of products—is altogether only 100,000 shekels.)
A simple example: a single bag worth 10 agorot contains 10 products with an average value of 20 shekels each. The store owner arrives, heart swelling with joy, and gives a discount of half an agora on each product. The competitors are devastated and the customers are in heaven…

As far as I know, there are many supermarkets that don’t charge 10 agorot for bags at all; it’s usually in smaller supermarkets that don’t belong to the big chains. That teaches you that from the sellers’ perspective this isn’t even about profit.
Also, if every customer were to be exacting about counting the bags precisely, that would slow down the checkout process, create longer lines, and hurt profits.

Fine, this really is a subject I’m not expert in. But I explained that this isn’t measured relative to the value of the products in the bag and some across-the-board discount on all of them. It could allow him to discount one item in the store by a few shekels.
But there’s no point getting into this. In my opinion it’s forbidden in any case, regardless of this discussion.

By the way, I think the law itself distinguishes between a supermarket and a small store or grocery, where there is no obligation to charge for bags.

Besides, there are also promotions by businesses that provide service without tax. They obviously pay it themselves. The same applies to bags. Even if they give them to you for free, that’s a benefit from the store. But if that benefit wasn’t given, you may not take it. Just as you wouldn’t pay a store without tax because some stores run such a promotion. All right, that’s it.

Rabbi, I didn’t read the whole discussion,
but as far as I know, the supermarkets really are not interested in the bag law at all. The state forces it on them for ecological reasons.
I go many times to supermarkets in different places.
And there are sellers who are completely lax about it, there are sellers who refuse to charge, etc. etc.
Am I obligated to return to the supermarket all the many tens of shekels they gave me as a gift that I didn’t even want, because the seller there simply refuses to hear about the bag law?
Am I obligated to make the cashier register ten bags for me when I tell her, and she still registers only three?

Many times in the big supermarkets the bag law just rounds off the agorot. So it comes out that if you took enough bags they’ll give you a completion to a whole number and that’s that.

That’s unrelated. Read above. If they gave it to you as a gift, then of course that’s fine.

It seems to me that the Rabbi has overlooked the simple point.
There’s no way I get to the checkout and they ask me roughly how many boxes of matches I took. Roughly how much does the bag of tomatoes weigh, or about how many chickens did I take?
And based on my answer they quickly punch in a price,
because that’s exactly what matters to them.
But specifically with bags, sometimes they charge and sometimes they don’t (in the same store), and in many supermarkets they ask how many bags you’ll take “approximately.”
Why?

And the answer is simple.
From the supermarket’s side, there’s no sale here, no business—they’re opposed to taking money for bags in the first place (in the end it lowers sales); it’s just that the law requires them to.
And like with any law, they try somehow maybe to comply with it, and certainly they’re not meticulous about it.
And it’s not like a tomato or a chicken 🍗 that they want to sell, and they’re very meticulous about the price; they stop the sale and weigh it—they don’t ask for an estimate or what you think…
Does that mean, in line with their own behavior, that you can answer approximately how many bags?

(When behind the “approximately” there’s a wink—meaning, from our side we don’t really care, take 8 and report 4, after all on average that way sales will go up.)

By the way,
there’s a big chain in the country where, in the branches I’ve bought at so far, at the beginning of the bill it is automatically entered as 7 bags.
Anyone who objects can take fewer, or if he wants to report more, the cashiers will do as he says.
But their default is 7 bags and on to the products…
What better proof is there from these practices that from their perspective this is merely a legal nuisance (which ideally would be canceled), and nothing more?

Not a sale, not important how many, and really just a disturbance.

I haven’t overlooked anything. All this has already been discussed and we’re repeating ourselves.

The supermarket loses nothing if they weren’t paid for the bag. According to the law, for every bag it “sells” it transfers the bag’s price to the state, so if it didn’t report the bag that I “stole,” then it doesn’t have to transfer it to the state, meaning it neither gains nor loses.