I live in a place where as of Jan 1st of this year, you have to pay a tax on plastic bags (5 cents per bag).
Unlike soda, just about everyone who goes grocery shopping in small increments uses bags (because a cart is overkill).
Yesterday I left the grocery store with a chicken breast sticking out of my coat pocket.
Complete success. Irish countryside used to have plastic bags everywhere. Now they're scarce.
I walk 5-6 miles a day around my neighborhood and I very rarely see plastic bags on the streets.
I mainly see crushed canned drinks, fast food wrappers and other garbage that would be left over from eating / drinking on foot or in a car. Most fast food places here use paper bags too.
Even if you bought 1 bag every day for a year that'll be $18.25. Most people won't care enough to reuse bags and will continue doing business as usual pre-tax.
Then of course, there's the ~7.4 billion other people on Earth who never even heard of a plastic bag tax so their habits won't change either.
I would rather see them just stop manufacturing plastic bags and also make them illegal. If their goal is to cut down on people using them that would be the way to do it. Instead, they tax it to an amount where they are hoping more than enough people won't care enough, so they can profit off laziness while they care nothing about the environment.
Actually a plastic bag charge or even ban becoming the norm in more and more parts of the world. If anything the US is late to this game.