(And not necessarily the same people who shopped with them. People who find an abandoned shopping cart in the parking lot would often bring it back to the store to get at the coin.)
Also, stray shopping carts left in the lot really doesn't seem like a big problem worth solving to me. The lots all have cart returns scattered throughout them, so you're never very far from one, and the vast majority of people use them.
Besides teenagers, grocery stores often hire mentally impaired people for bagging and cart wrangling. They seem to enjoy the work more than the teenagers.
Isn't the point here that the teenager has that job because there are no coin slots in carts, so there has to be someone collecting the carts?
I don't know if the teenager would be happier without a job, but that is a bit of a leading question - it's not like fetching carts is the only job that exists. Maybe they would prefer to work a different job that doesn't involve cart wrangling, and involves spending more time doing something useful.
That's a big part of the reason to we don't let poor migrants into the country (almost whichever rich country you live in), and work menial jobs without a social safety net. 'Who wants to look at poor, miserable people?' Better to leave them to rot in other countries where we don't have to look at them..
I figure the coin is really just mostly there as a signifier that it's your job to return the cart and not some store employees job.
But, I guess, American supermarkets are not anywhere near the cities.
Ie you can essentially contract out bringing the cart back for a quarter of a dollar.
In Germany, you could theoretically walk your cart a few blocks to your home, then leave it on the street.
I saw plenty of supermarkets with carts asking for coin having their cart stolen and abandoned across town. I think it's mainly linked with whether you have juvenile "gangs" fooling around or not
It’s a cute idea but I’m not sure it’s practical in the long run.
It has been practical for a long time, but you may be right in that they'll have a hard time with the younger generations that transition to being cashless.
Similar to how when you are working as a programmer, it's good for not to break 'master'. You could rely completely on an honour system, or you could have an automated merge-check. In most places, the merge-check can be arbitrarily easy to bypass, but programmers would still by and large abide it.