Grocery Store Idea

I am by no means a saint, but I try to be environmentally conscious - I turn off lights, unplug my not-in-use chargers, limit my shower time, etc. But one thing I cannot seem to get a handle on is my garbage. It seems like whenever I turn around I am throwing away a perfectly good - but empty - shampoo bottle, juice jug, or cereal box. Yeah, it should prompt me to recycle more than I do, but instead it got me thinking about packaging in general. Think about everything in your house that comes in a package you just toss out (basically everything). The amount of waste is staggering.

What if there was a new type of grocery store that was more of a refill station? You bring in a shampoo bottle and just refill it from a big vat, or scoop out more potato chips into your reusable potato chip bag, or count out how ever many aspirin you want. Think of how much money we would all save when the packaging costs were cut out and how much less waste we would contribute to the world.

Sure, there might be an initial investment in some reusable containers. And there would be a lot of logistics to figure out - like how do you tag things to know what people have in their containers and do you price by weight/amount/volume/kitty cats (making sure you were still awake)? How do you ensure freshness when there aren't sealed bags? Do you force the customer to use the store's approved reusable containers or their own? Maybe the customer brings back their old containers and picked up new ones each time so they were clean (then the store would clean yours and give them to someone else)?

And of course the store wouldn't be the only one with a new concept - the product manufacturers themselves would have to get onboard with this to provide goods sans packaging. The store would return the bins that held the product to the manufacturer for their own refills.

Also, customers would have to be ok with the limited brand choices - it wouldn't be efficient to have 35 different types of toothpaste to choose from. But Costco has long lived by the 1 brand name/1 private label product choices and people are still flocking there.

What do you guys think? Would you go to a store that required a bit more work (bringing your own containers) to save a lot of money and help the environment at the same time?