Hong Kong - A trendy canvas shopping bag by top designer Anya Hindmarch labelled "I'm not a plastic bag" was handed out to buyers wrapped in three plastic bags, a news report said Thursday. Sales of the sought-after bag, which retails for around 15 US dollars but sells online for up to 10 times as much, were suspended in Hong Kong last week because of a stampede of would-be buyers.
Instead, buyers were given coupons and instructions to collect the bags from Hong Kong's Wellcome supermarkets on Wednesday to avoid a repeat of the chaos last Friday.
When they arrived, buyers were handed the bags each wrapped in one clear plastic bag and two Wellcome plastic bags, apparently in an attempt to disguise them from other people, the South China Morning Post reported.
"The packaging was wrong. There's a contradiction," Green power leader Man Chi-sun told the newspaper, who dismissed the sale of the Anya Hindmarch bags as a gimmick.
"A simple backpack or any durable bag would be good enough to use as an environmentally-friendly bag," he said.
Planned sales of the bags, launched to make it fashionable not to use plastic bags, at the only Anya Hindmarch store in Beijing have been cancelled because of the frenzied behaviour of customers in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the newspaper reported.
