Paper or plastic?...Can bags define our life?!

I saw a duty-free shop bag in the hands of an old man in the bus today. Duty free...old retired man...a bit of a stretch...huh? What would an old man be doing at a duty free shop???...from Turkey no less??? Then I started thinking of the story behind that...Perhaps his adult kids visited Turkey and brought him back a present from the duty free shop....And there it is...a bag just gave way to a possible story related to an old person's life. We see them every day on the street...carton, plastic, branded bags...some really tacky...some really elegant......First you look at whatever's imprinted...read the message...the slogan...Then u look up at the person holding them and start thinking of how he got his hands on it! They're like T-shirts in a way...only that young fashion-minded people are very selective about the T-shirts they wear...I wonder if there are people that get selective about the bags they carry...and whatever is written on them? Or do bags just have a functional purpose to most and are chosen according to specific carrige needs: volume, size, etc. They have huuuuge branding potential..esspecially in Romania...unexploited just as yet!
I remember a friend of mine visiting Paris and bringing back a very special shopping bag from a posh neighborhood! She was robbed one day and that bag saved one of her most valuable belongings! She was walking up to her appartment when two men carring heavy loads of stuff in plastic bags greated her as they passed down the hall. She greated them back but stopped to look at the bags they were carring. One was the very bag she had bought from Paris! She reacted almost instantly grabbing the bag from the man's hands (she knew the possibility of another bag like that in her building were slim so she automatically connected the dots and realised those guys had robbed her house). In the bag was her laptop! This is a true bag story :D