I too am all for getting rid of plastic straws and other things that are wasteful and harmful to the environment.

That said, I remember being incredulous, to the point of wondering if I was on Candid Camera, when a cash register jockey in Seattle wanted me to PAY for a plastic bag a couple years ago.

So maybe I'm not as green as I'd like to be. But yeah, get rid of straws. I'm capable of drinking from a cup without spilling the contents down the front of my shirt (most of the time).

When I waited tables at a nice restaurant many years ago and served a lot of soft drinks and iced tea with ice in glasses (glass glasses, not to-go cups), I learned that women usually want straws and men usually do not.

Yes, that's a generalization without any scientific method behind it, but often when I wouldn't bring straws along with drinks to a table, the women would often ask for a straw the second they saw I didn't bring any. I mean, they wanted one immediately! Men seldom asked for a straw.

I might never have noticed this trend, except there was a corporate spec that said carbonated drinks (Coke, Sprite, etc.) must come with a straw but iced tea did not. Or maybe it was the other way around - it was a long time ago. This was in the Carolinas where "sweet tea" is a widely-consumed beverage, so if you did things per corporate specs, a four-top (table with four guests) with two teas and two Cokes only got two straws with four drinks. This made the server look incompetent at best and downright rude at worst, so like most corporate specifications, it was often ignored.

But, it became a topic of discussion for us older, more serious servers who shared tips and tricks for moving faster and making more money. Not taking the time to stop for straws on the way out to a table with the initial drink order was one of those risks that sometimes seemed to pay off and sometimes didn't.