NYC Cracks Down: Kosher Groceries Hit With Wave of Bag Fines

By FrumNews.com

Brooklyn, NY — New York City officials are fining Grocery stores in Boro Park and Crown Heights for distributing plastic bags, a regulation the city imposed a while back, but never enforced.

Earlier this week, BoroPark24 reported that inspectors issued separate fines for each cash register, resulting in significant penalties for some Kosher grocery stores in Boro Park.

For now, the stores absorbed the cost, but the burden is already being felt. “This is a new reality,” a grocer told BP24. “We received many fines at once, and we simply cannot keep absorbing these costs.”

FrumNews was informed that a Crown Heights Kosher store, The Market Place, informed customers that they would not be supplying grocery bags at the register.

According to the law, businesses are required to collect a non-taxable 5-cent fee from customers on paper carryout bags, with some exceptions. You can avoid paying the paper bag fee by bringing your own reusable bags to stores. Stores are required to allow the use of reusable shopping bags.

***

Over the decade that liberals tried to shoehorn this “tax” on New Yorkers, frum legislators—Simcha Felder, Chaim Deutsch, Kalman Yeger, and Simcha Eichenstein—rallied against the law, which hurts the frum community. Even after it passed, Felder pushed a bill that would reverse the tax.

“I am completely opposed to the legislation…requiring retail and grocery stores to charge at least 10 cents for paper and plastic bags at retail and grocery stores,” then-State Senator Simcha Felder said in 2013. “New Yorkers cannot afford the basics, and now the City Council is essentially telling the average New Yorker who’s in trouble, ‘not only are you suffering, but we’re really going to stomp on your head by charging you 10 cents extra per bag.’ This is nothing more than a tax and an attempt to make money. People are already overtaxed and overburdened…It was a tax five years ago, and it’s still a tax today.”

Perhaps because of the heavy backlash by the frum legislators and their community, officials never really enforced the law on Kosher supermarkets, but now that’s changing.

One askan told FrumNews, “Now the officials are going specifically to the so-called ‘Hasidic’ community, because according to officials, they are separate from the wider Jewish community and they can easily target them, just like during COVID.”

“Kosher food is expensive enough, so why is the city making it even more expensive and unmanageable?” a Crown Heights resident told FrumNews. “Here in Brooklyn, where more people shop without a car, this law just makes life harder.”

***

Kosher grocers are urging residents to bring reusable bags to avoid extra charges and help stores stay compliant. “Reuse your bags so you won’t get charged all the time,” a grocer told BP24—hoping that cooperation from the community would ease the burden of the new regulations.