SimpleHuman KT1000 Stainless Steel Grocery Bag Dispenser
Price: ~$14 including shipping.
Pros: Immensely practical; nice aesthetic design
Cons: Adhesive is very fussy and fails to hold up to proper use
Overall: There’s not much in the way of criteria for bag dispensers… if you want to buy the best in grocery bag dispensary, get this simplehuman unit (unless you absolutely need an adhesive wall-mounted dispenser).
Sick and tired of your bag of bags sitting under your kitchen sink? Want to upgrade your bag dispensary to match your hyper-modern stainless steel kitchen? SimpleHuman has taken the retail world by storm with its line of stainless steel products, so it’s no surprise that they’ve expanded into the grocery bag dispensary sector.
The unit comes with double-sided tape pre-attached to the back, and also comes with holes and appropriate mounting screws for a more permanent installation. How the grocery dispensary function works is elusively simple: you put bags in through one hole, and pull them out of another that is built to put a force between the inside and outside of the dispenser that will separate the grocery bags as you pull on them. Bags come out with a firm pull, which is only a problem if you’ve mounted the unit on a location that doesn’t handle that kind of force routinely (like a cabinet door, for example), or the unit is mounted improperly.
And about those mountings. Since I am a renter and want to minimize the amount of damage I have to repair upon moving out, I tried using the adhesive method. However, the force required to pull out the bags in some instances put a lot of pressure on the adhesive wall mount, which actually lifted up a layer of paint and caused an air bubble to form before breaking free from the wall. Considering I used the adhesive to avoid damaging the paint in the first place, that was a pretty poor outcome.
I ended up working around this by placing the bag holder horizontally on top of my refrigerator, and it works great now. When I have to throw something nasty away that I don’t want in the general garbage (food that will rot, dog poop, etc.), I now have a bag in my hand within seconds. As I always advise, making your life more efficient is a matter of adding little practicalities one-by-one. The $14 I spent on this item (including shipping) is well-spent, and this dispenser will be part of my kitchen for years to come.
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