CA's plastic bad "ban" isn't actually a ban and is something more complex.
1. Restaurants are free to use whatever, including the "single-use" thin plastic bags the Enviros hate.
2. When I go to the grocery store, one of the options I have when checking out - live cashier or self-check - is to have my groceries bagged in slightly less flimsy plastic bags, for which I would be charged $0.10 apiece. The article basically is about people still tossing out these hypothetically multi-use bags after the single use of bringing their groceries home.
I grew up in a home in which the paper bags were refolded for eventual reuse, so we reuse paper and reasonably robust plastic bags. I'm pretty sure that some significant degree of reuse has always been fairly common, but Enviros gotta have their bogey-stereotypes.