When a hipster grocery store clerk shames the Bears for asking for plastic grocery bags, the Bears realize that eco-friendly tote bags are their way of gaining acceptance amongst the progressive people of the Bay Area. But in their effort to gain popularity, the Bears let the culture of tote bags take over their lives.
Tropes:
- Cringe Comedy: The scene where the clerk is shaming the bears about protecting the environment.
- Comically Missing the Point: As the EPA worker points out, the point of tote bags is that you only need one or two (or six, if you're pretentious about it), and not hoard hundreds as the bears do.
- Driven to Madness: The bears succumb to this with their tote bag hoarding. Panda even tries to date one.
- Jerkass: The hipster clerk shames the bears for not using tote bags, even though he could just point out the rack of them sitting two feet away.
- MacGyvering: What ultimately happens to the bears' tote bags. After discovering their first tote bag, which has a beaver on it, Panda gets the idea to use the tote bags as a makeshift beaver dam.
- Madness Mantra: "Tote Life" goes from a pretentious catchphrase to a creepy affirmation used to justify the bears' descent into madness.
- Mood Whiplash: Once the EPA worker goes inside the bear den, the majority of the episode ups the creep factor.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Grizz is immediately snapped out of his "tote bag trance" when he realizes his and his brothers' tote bag hoarding is harming the local wildlife.
- Trash of the Titans: The bears become so obsessed with carrying around tote bags and indulging in "Tote Life" that a member of the Environmental Protection Agency has to help them escape from their own home and show them that their tote bags are being littered all around the forest and affecting the environment.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The addiction of the tote bags all because of the hipster clerk who belittled the bears about the environment and introduced the trio to the tote bags, causing the bears to become obsessed with the tote bags.
- Verbal Tic: After the tote bags begin taking over the bears' lives, they start using the word "tote" in front of everything, like tote tea.
