Why don't people return their shopping carts?
behavioralscientist.org
behavioralscientist.org
>“The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing. To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore, the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it.”
>“No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you, or kill you for not returning the shopping cart. You gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct. The Shopping Cart Theory, therefore, is a great litmus test on whether a person is a good or bad member of society.”
There is nothing wrong with citing 4chans shopping cart theory.
It is truly a marker of good vs bad people as far as it comes to participating in a high trust society.
One thing I want to point out is that everyone I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts. The employees saw it as a mini-break from the drudgery of the day.
From having to go get carts many times, I will say, that if someone leaves their cart in a parking spot... well that is bad behavior. But if they just push it into the grass, or out of the way, who cares if it is tucked away there, or tucked away at cart corral. Someone has to go out and get the carts anyway, and it broke up the day, got you outside.
> Who is really being inconvenienced?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/smugjak-but-how-does-this-aff...
I did not usually see a free roaming cart though. Maybe times have changed. Usually, people would prop them up against a curb, or ditch them into a grassy spot, or they would put them by a low spot in the parking lot next to a drain, or put them next to a column on the sidewalk.
Just my anecdotal experience, it seemed like people would put their cart back if there was a cart corral in the center of every parking row.
I once calculated the number of carts Walmart has worldwide and it was mind-boggling.
Sometimes you can't park without getting out of the car to clean up after other people, because carts are littering the parking spaces. (Including being pushed from adjacent spots into handicap spaces.)
I've parked near corrals and had people half-ass push them next to it, effectively double parking me until I removed several carts.
I've had to jump out of the way of carts being whipped down an aisle by a strong wind in a storm.
Nobody's talking about bringing carts back to the building, but doing the bare minimum of putting them in the corrals. Failing to do so is saying you value your minor convenience over other peoples' time, property and health. Tucking them on a curb is saying you know you're doing a bad thing but don't really care.
That said
> But if they just push it into the grass, or out of the way,
One marker of whether something is acceptable in society(or having a functioning brain, at times) is to ask oneself "what would happen if everyone did what I'm doing." This applies to most things...littering, talking on speakerphone or blasting music in public, etc. I think this example would similarly fail this test, imagining hundreds of carts piled up somewhere 'out of the way.'
Except for particularly busy times, I don't think you'd see major pile ups.
But I generally agree with what you are saying. It's a valuable question to ask "what if everyone did this".
He got two fishes and five loaves delivered in a clear door dash advertisement.
Like it's pre-loading being an asshole. I hate it. Have your bad day in a way that doesn't continue the dominoes falling and causing other bad days, however much misery loves company.
On days with a strong wind it is more important to rerun the cart, because leaving it loose will mean it’s likely to hit someone’s car. This is when the golden rule comes into play.
Only thing that's more insufferable is the keyboard warriors loosing sleep over tiny things like that.
It takes 30 seconds to return a cart. Nobody is so busy or has so many kids as to not be able to wheel the cart into the cart stall. If you have that many kids, then you probably can't really safely grocery shop in the first place.
The reason it gets brought up is exactly because it's a small thing to do that is generally accepted as being the right thing to do. You basically won't find someone defending not wheeling back the cart as being the right thing to do (outside of maybe a true emergency).
as the parent said, it's a 30 second walk and if you can't trust kiddo not to die for 30 seconds you shouldn't be shopping w/ them in the first place.
It is an inconvenience though, even if as insignificant as an eyesore for others, or the landscaper who may need to remove shopping carts from the planter to do their work.
You could apply similar logic to people who carelessly throw trash in the recycling bin or on a sidewalk where it’s someone else’s job to clean up after them. I’ve seen people go as far as to say they are graciously “providing a job” for someone else when they throw their refuse in the recycling bin.
The fact that the shopping carts are such an inconsequential thing to shrug off is what makes them a great litmus test — will you do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do, even when there is so little at stake
The great thing about the “job creation” theory of antisocial behavior is that it justifies all kinds of things, from graffiti to dumping to stealing decorative plants from the local park. Why bother following implicit (or even explicit) rules if there is no consequence? Surely it won’t have any consequences in the long run!
I confess I am a hypocrite though, as I'm one of those job-stealing people that return the cart to the corral.
I always return my cart.
The theory holds and you are making excuses for bad behaviors
Unless you're "having kids" in the sense that you're about to give birth to one, saving 30-60 seconds isn't going to make a difference in your day. It's like trying to optimize your travel timing so you can stop at fewer red lights. Maybe it gives someone the illusion of efficiency, but no one is really saving any time.
Most people who leave carts don't mind them blocking others' paths. If you're going out of your way to push one over the curb and into the muddy grass, you might as well have parked it in the designated spot by now.
Where I am, large enough stores have dedicated "outside" employees, most of whose time is be spent pushing carts. For them it's not a fun change of pace, it's just their job. If everyone put their carts back in an orderly fashion, they would need to do less weaving in parking lot traffic and trudging through horrible weather than they otherwise have to. Sure, "it's their job", but I don't want to make it even harder, especially considering how much they tend to be paid.
Funny how peoples' attitude toward retail employees probably wouldn't extend to more work being created for them in their work.
No, this is simply about can people do small things to make the system better. Things that cost them essentially nothing but make the world work.
Burns off the karma from being a trouble maker on IRC (sorry Undernet). Although doing things to burn karma just generates karma for doing good things for the wrong reasons.
I've spent a lot of time cleaning up and observing a small strip of sidewalk in front of a retail establishment in a city and I've come to believe in a variation of the broken windows theory. If I let the sidewalk become too messy, or if I remove the trash but not the dead leaves in the fall then more trash will appear at a seemingly exponential rate. If I do a thorough job cleaning the entire area and removing all debris, however, it stays tidy for many hours, sometimes even days. I don't believe for one second that keeping the area tidy prevents people from littering there. I think the people who would drop their candy wrapper are going to do it anyway, but I think there are many people who, while walking through my tidy section of sidewalk, bend over and pick up the candy wrapper when they see it. I just think they don't bother when there's two or three candy wrappers, thus causing the observed effect.
Sometimes people do feel guilty dropping stuff, but usually only if they notice me watching them do it.
The workers, drivers, and potentially future shoppers.
>I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts.
You're getting the carts either way. I won't speak to if it helps to give you more time to yourself when collecting wayward carts, but there is some built in time for collections even with "good shoppers".
> if someone leaves their cart in a parking spot... well that is bad behavior
Yes, hence the shopping cart theory.
I'm not a perfect person but try to keep it out of parking those times I am tired. But I recognize that carts can still roll into the lot or that it increases risks of a future car who comes in.
I also feel many feel (irrationally) that they are being ripped off by the store and thus won’t bother to return the cart out of spite.
We had some woods and a little stream next to the parking lot. Some people would chuck the carts into the woods. That’s probably considered bad behavior, but for me, that was just more time I could spend outside and a little adventure to fetch the cart and get it back up the hill through the trees.
I could see working at a big store where you’re expected to bring in 50 carts at a time to be annoying. I was at a smaller places and would only bring in 5 or 6 at a time. Some of the managers would get annoyed at that, but I was getting minimum wage and was the only person who didn’t complain about the cold and snow, so they could just deal with my pace. I wanted to make sure I could control what I was pushing, so I didn’t hurt anyone or break anything. We don’t even have a rope, like I see most places have now.
Sounds terrible but the owner didn't mind, or at least didn't discourage it. Those people didn't have cars and if they had to carry groceries home by hand they'd just buy less groceries or perhaps not shop there at all. He would just drive a pickup truck to the apartment building at the end of the day to collect carts.
When he began the story I thought it was about to be a racist story about "low-income" people (bit of a barely-disguised dog whistle there) but it wound up being pretty cool. An ad-hoc system that worked to everybody's benefit.
I’ve noticed very few kids doing little chores like this these days. Maybe I just don’t notice it. Maybe it’s a sign of a wider rot regarding parenting. Maybe it’s nothing.
I remember my brothers and I liked doing it because we'd ride on the sides of the cart while putting it away.
You must've lived someplace with good weather. I can't imagine it being fun in a snowstorm.
Being nice to a waiter doesn't require additional work. Also, being a jerk to the waiter hurts another human being directly and is a strategic error because it is more likely to cause them to spit in your food than it is to get you better service.
In contrast, leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly. It just makes a supermarket run slightly less efficiently.
This could theoretically raise prices by increasing labor requirements, but it's not a linear relationship. Failing to return a cart would only increase prices if enough people do it to cross the threshold at which they would need to have an additional cart-collecting employee.
It's still an anti-social behavior, but the impact is more nebulous.
Found a cart leaver. :)
I would count on the waiter not being a jerk, and trying to hurt people just because they are a jerk.
> In contrast, leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly. It just makes a supermarket run slightly less efficiently.
What? It is hardly any extra work, you also have walked the same way when taking the cart. And it annoys people after you, including yourself, when you come in the next day and find a shopping cart standing on your parking lot.
> Being nice to a waiter doesn't require additional work.
Maintaining a social interaction is intellectual more work, than pushing a cart around. This very much depends on your personal preference, to some people social interactions are a lot of work.
> Failing to return a cart would only increase prices if enough people do it to cross the threshold at which they would need to have an additional cart-collecting employee.
So you rely on all the other people not taking liberties, you should be allowed to do? What do you think you are?
It depends on the store. If it's a very large parking lot, and you're parked at the far end of it, it can be a long walk to get back to your car. If the store didn't bother putting any designated cart-return locations in the lot (which happens a lot), then returning the cart means doubling your walking time. So it really is a lot of extra work, or at least time, so it is understandable why some people would avoid this extra work/time and take the easy way out.
>And it annoys people after you
Yes, but you don't ever see these people; they come after you've left. It's not like being rude to the waiter's face.
You can make an argument that it's different because the stuff being measured is at the other end of the "how easily can they change it" spectrum but that doesn't change the fundamental accuracy of the correlation. Something like this shouldn't be used for anything serious.
It is truly a marker of good vs bad people as
far as it comes to participating in a high trust
society.
Do you ever grab one of those "stranded" shopping carts on the way in to the store?
A lot of societal issues can't be cured merely by doing the right thing ourselves. Littering can't be solved merely by not littering - somebody has to pick up litter. (A lot of litter is the result of wind blowing over trashcans and such, so even in a society where nobody intentionally litters, there will be litter)
Murder can't be solved merely by not murdering people - if you witness a murder, you need to do something about it, not just think "well, at least I don't murder people" and continue with your day.
Shopping cart logistics are obviously many orders of magnitude less serious than murder, but I think it's a similar class of problem/solution.
But now and then I find one of the electric ride-a-carts and that’s the reward for all my work; riding the scootypuff jr in to the glorious chords of … the Walmart theme song.
I lived in several European countries for many years. I then moved to the US a few years ago.
The US strikes me as a less civilised country, in the sense that people, on average don't return the shopping cart. In the first year after I moved, I kept returning the shopping cart, but, after seeing many others not do it, I stopped. I stopped even though I agree it is the right thing to do because I felt like a fool every time I did it. Other people decided their time is too important to return the cart, so why should I be the sucker who does it?
This isn't the only example of uncivilised behaviour I've noticed in the US. Here are other examples: bypassing a long queue of cars only to merge into the lane at the last possible second, skipping red lights if no cars are around, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and forcing other to walk around me, not saying "you're welcome", not giving up my seat on public transportation to e.g. old people, littering.
Every time I see someone break these markers of civilised society, makes me less likely to abide by them next time.
If everyone did this the jams would flow faster, according to WSDOT.
It's about reducing queue length (you use 2 lanes instead of one, so the queue length is halved) and smaller speed differences between cars on adjacent lanes.
I can't find a good WSDOT source, but here's Minesotta: https://www.dot.state.mn.us/trafficeng/workzone/doc/When-lat...
Anyway, I'm not talking about cases where one lane is closed (which is what WSDOT and the Minesotta doc talk about). I'm talking about cases where there is a one lane offroad from the highway, with a queue of cars waiting to take it. Plenty of people will skip the entire queue and try to merge right at the end, blocking half of their own lane while waiting for a gap in the queue.
* The time spent adjacent to the traffic lane should be used calibrating your speed with the speed of traffic, once you're at the front you should then be able to merge into an open spot without causing any change to the speed of the cars behind you. So many times I see people zip quickly to the front then merge in and slam on their brakes, causing an extra delay to ripple back through traffic. Some people do this at the beginning of the merge lane which is even worse.
* Once you get there you should endeavor to zipper merge so multiple cars aren't trying to squeeze into one spot. As a corollary, if you're already in the lane that's being merged into you should leave an open space big enough for one vehicle to enter at this point, or better yet consider leaving the lane entirely.
* And by that I mean leave the lane to move deeper into the highway, don't exit into the merging lane just to zip ahead and cut back in, this decidedly does not improve traffic flows.
You can change straight/right/left here and it all holds. Zipper merges are for merges, when 2 lanes of traffic become one, and everyone merging early is a little bit worse. Above is just selfish.
Not sure if you're from the US, but the problem is objectively not as bad here as people say. If you look at various Walmarts (usually these are reliably some of the worst parking lots in any given area) in Google Maps (switch to satellite view) the reality is that the vast majority of people here actually do return their carts properly.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/uWE4wfydda7KtT2W8
https://maps.app.goo.gl/rCBrJKebU33rMq8J6
https://maps.app.goo.gl/5o4GksqTGahBkU816
The last one is by far the worst one I found.
Because it's the right thing to do.
You maybe are making yourself part of the 1% who don't return their cart (or my locale is better than average at returning it)
people, on average don't return the shopping cart
I'm nearly 50 and have been to many, many parking lots including some truly forsaken ones. The parking lot at the Walmart near me is a travesty. People dump trash on the ground there, and I don't mean simple littering. It's so gross. It makes you feel like society is crumbling and that civilization was perhaps a mistake in the first place.
And yet...
I just returned from a quick trip there several minutes ago. I naturally thought of this thread (because I'm insane) while traversing the parking lot. I counted four unreturned carts, and several dozen properly corralled carts. The ratio was at least 10:1, possibly more.
This isn't "my" Walmart, but here's one near me that's notorious for being a bit of a Mad Max situation. If you switch to satellite view, you can see that even here the coralled carts seem to greatly outnumber the stranded ones.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/uWE4wfydda7KtT2W8
bypassing a long queue of cars only to merge into the lane
at the last possible second
Anecdotally I've heard that our drivers are nowhere near the worst, but I don't have firsthand experience.
You really are a fool. Who willingly gives up the chance to get some free exercise and feel morally superior? I'm over here happily returning others' shopping carts, not just my own, and basking in the knowledge of how I'm a better human being than you maest.
Of course. They're typically more convenient than the carts that have been properly returned.
Nope.
..but that's because I have my own cart I bring to the store.
In my experience, there are certainly reasons that returning the cart might be difficult or impossible (handicap, small children etc.).
If you speak to employees about it, I have been told that they often actually like going outside to get the carts, so to me this is not only increased convenience for me personally, but desired by the employees also as they get a "break" from the chaos inside the store.
This has been my experience as well, but people will always blindly insist the opposite just to "win" the shopping cart argument.
They are getting the carts either way. No one is saying to return all carts to the store. There are several partking lot racks for a reason.
If you can get the cart around the store, across the parking lot and to your car, you can get it back to its home too. It didn't teleport to your car.
Here's my counter theory: People's moral righteousness on whether they think a person can be judged by a morally neutral and inconsequential action sheds light on their true moral character. Especially so if the judged action is insignificant but socially frowned on.
I know this is all in half-jest but the article and discussion seem pretty mean-spirited to me.
You call it moral righteousness. I call it emotional intelligence. You realize as you grow up that your small actions shape and reflect your larger self. And you can see it in others too.
We call it "work ethic" in white collar jobs, and I'm sure you wouldn't defend someone who's otherwise an excellent programmer submitting sloppy reports, having inconsistent time estimates, or simply making snarky PR's. It's a shame we don't value it when it's not about maximizing shareholder value.
Whereas not returning the cart can only be explained in two ways: a thought process that says ‘not my problem’ (selfish, disorderly, bad for society) or no thought process at all, like an animal with no higher order thinking.
Some years back someone did a study about which country's US diplomats at the UN had the highest number of NYC parking tickets. Diplomats don't need to pay parking fines due to immunity. This is very similar to returning shopping carts.
As I recall, it was clearly correlated with country, which in turn was connected to national corruption rates. Ahh, here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12312/w123...
> Overall, the basic pattern accords reasonably well with common perceptions of corruption across countries. The worst parking violators – the ten worst are Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria, Mozambique, Albania, Angola, Senegal, and Pakistan – all rank poorly in cross-country corruption rankings. While many of the countries with zero violations accord well with intuition (e.g., the Scandinavian countries, Canada), there are a number of surprises. Some of these are countries with very small missions (e.g., Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic), and a few others have high rates of parking violations but do pay the fines (these are Bahrain, Malaysia, Oman, and Turkey; we return to this issue below).
I've read far too many stories of people who don't clean up after themselves at a store or restaurant, justified by "no need - they pay someone to do this" or even "it's a good thing I do this otherwise you wouldn't have a job" to know it's simply intellectual ability.
That they can barely articulate a verbalized post-hoc rationalization* for that kind of behavior doesn't prevent them from lacking the minimum processing power needed to achieve awareness of how they are leaving ungreased the machinery of the commons. Into which they will keep being embedded, pulling levers left and right all day long.
Even a moderately zero-sum minded sociopath can be aware of the perks of investing a modicum of well-placed niceness; if for no other reason, just to avoid losing social capital.
* And probably a memetic one, hardly an original thought.
> Our college study group meets a few times a week. They’re long sessions, three or four hours each. Whenever someone runs out for food, we all chip in a little extra so the runner doesn’t have to pay. Simple deal: “If you fly, I’ll buy.”
> About an hour into one session, one of the girls stretches and says she’s heading to Dunkin’ Donuts.
> Me: “Ooh, I’ll buy if you fly.”
> She stops mid-step and gives me this horrified look.
> Girl: “I don’t bring food to other people. Servants do that.”
The articulate reason for not bringing a cart is because their station in life is above menial work.
Regarding social capital, the story goes on and finishes with:
> The room goes dead silent.
> We’ve been doing this for weeks, with everyone taking turns, no big deal. But apparently, today, we’ve got royalty in our study group. She wondered why she was left out of any group meals after that…
Now imagine someone with money, who never had to clean up after others (and hires people to clean after themselves), and has little interaction with the working class. Why do you think they'll care about what the plebes think?
Those who lack that surplus wealth are "leaving money on the table", so to speak, by not caring about others. That's dumb.
And her pedigree or whatever gave her those aristocratic ways didn't save her from mild ostracism at the end of the story, so... That's social capital she left on the table. That's also kinda dumb even if she had enough money/power to enable god mode. It's even dumber if she didn't have it.
A customer returns two abandoned carts. Another customer assumes the first is an employee. After learning the truth, “Stupid woke b****! Why are you trying to confuse people!”
There's all sorts of stories on that site from people who make a mess. Some think it's actually a good thing to do, like https://notalwaysright.com/food-trash-for-thought/344130/ :
> One of the friends of a friend suddenly empties the car’s ashtray and garbage onto the parking lot floor.
> Me: “Hey! Pick that back up!”
> Guy: “Nah, they pay people to do that; I’m doing them a favor.”
In that story there is a mild bit of rebuke, but it's clear that's not the first time that guy did that.
Sometimes it's power tripping, like https://notalwaysright.com/if-you-act-like-trash-you-become-...
> Like most fast food places, there are several trash cans conveniently placed with counters attached, so people can clean up their own messes.
> There are always those special folks, though, who leave their trash on the table for the employees to clean up. Usually, it’s just trash, but there is this group of four young guys who always aim to outdo themselves.
It took exceptional circumstances for them to face consequences, in this case, losing a pair of expensive sunglasses. Again, it clearly wasn't the first time.
Or some just think that's the way things are, and pass on that belief to the next generation, like https://notalwaysright.com/mopportunity-knocks/398025/ "
> A mum and her young child are coming through my lane when the child spills a lot of juice all over the floor and part of my register. The mum, without hesitation, says to the child:
> Customer: “Don’t worry. It’s their job to tidy up.”
Again, there is rebuke
> My shoulders sink as I’m about to accept my fate, when my manager, who happened to be nearby, runs over with a wet mop (we keep one by the registers at all times just in case) and hands it to the mum.
> Manager: “Nope. Your monkey, your circus.”
> Customer: A bit discombobulated. “That… that’s not how it works!”
But the reason these stories make that web site is because rebuke is rare, and thus noteworthy, while showing that a lot of people - not just those who are wealthy or have really powerful connections - do this.
Slightly veering OT:
While I get the sore need for a place to vent after being subjected to a customer-facing workday, the website you keep linking to gives me in aggregate the rage farming vibes that are as prone to distort everyday reality as blind naïveté could be.
To give but one of many examples, when rail passengers called Black porters "George", as if the porters were owned by George Pullman, those passengers reinforced racist Jim Crow laws. There were not dumb or sociopaths, but rather gained more social capital from others of their class (or more powerful) than was lost to the Black porters.
I have duly noted your bothsiderism position. My point, however, was to give counter-examples, such as verbalized explanations which were not post hoc, to show why I disagreed with your characterizations.
I have known some rich snobs in my life, but I have never been someplace where a even the rich snobs would say something like that out loud (even if maybe they were thinking it)
The IQ of a crowd isn't the same as the IQ of the people in it, but it is related.
For me it was an objective truth until I moved to a more culturally diverse city, these people are no dumber than I but they simply do not understand my pov
Its plain old apathy and no sense of responsibility or shared ownership. Outside is just something you share with other 1.4 billion people of the country.
The cycle usually goes like one idiot starts throwing trash, other idiots start adding their trash too, few weeks/months govt workers do a bare minimum job of clean-up, repeat.
it is not so simple of a problem with clear cut solution.
We don't need alien tech to solve these, it's 100% an education issue.
When I lived in Philadelphia here in the USA, it would vary street by street and block by block even when there were no ethnic or economic divides.
One block would have litter all over the place and the next one would be clean. To this day, I am still puzzled by that.
There are some very mundane possible explanations, probably due to a combination of pedestrian traffic patterns and wind. (My observation is that some % of litter, probably a large % IMO, is simply trash that blew out of trashcans as opposed to being intentionally discarded)
Still, I found it baffling and surprising
You can draw a pretty clear line across about half of america with this standard. It's depressing.
You're an animal, or your not. We shouldn't give animals human rights.
In Germany I see far fewer abandoned shopping carts than in America.
* Not considering physical limitations.
You gain something if others put their trolleys away. You gain something [fuzzy] knowing you may have helped others. We have these mechanisms of cooperation that some people eschew, that some demand, and coin-release trolleys are the response to what happens when it breaks down.
Coincidentally a supermarket near me has recently converted their trolley stock to coin-release. I have three children and increasingly few Pound coins so a result of this is I shop less, and far less impulsively. Good job, Tesco.
People here have mentioned it only taking 30-60 seconds, which definitely speaks to European centric stuff. A lot of the places I’ve shopped where I’m using a cart, it takes minutes to return. That’s why people aren’t doing it. You spend 1-2 minutes walking to your car. That’s why they leave the cart, it’s an extra 5 minutes round trip. But for an employee who is going to be going around the lot anyway to do this job, it’s no extra added time.
This also ignores that people like me will sometimes pickup a cart like this on the way to store if it’s convenient. We also don’t leave them in parking spaces or whatever. We leave them somewhere reasonable.
Leaving carts means someone must retrieve.
I've been around Europe a fair bit and from Bulgaria to Portugal, people just return their carts. It's a no-brainer.
Museums, libraries, and train stations aren’t places I go weekly, like a grocery store. When I do go, I can’t remember the last time I ever used a public locker. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used one of those in my life. I don’t tend to carry much stuff with me, so a locker isn’t something I generally need.
I was once 75 cents ahead by the time I made it inside of an Aldi in Columbus, Ohio because there were 3 free-range carts in the parking lot that I returned. Three was a lot -- most days I only found one cart hanging out in the parking lot.
In my current neck of the woods things are a bit different. There's never any carts roaming the parking lot, and there's usually carts with quarters already in them, parked properly up by the door.
(I often leave one parked with a quarter like that myself, but it's not because of some "pay it forward" quasi-altruistic purpose or something. Sometimes I just want to pick my groceries up out of the cart and walk to the car and I just don't have enough free hands to deal with retrieving the quarter. So I line up the cart with the others, grab my bag or two of things, and shove the cart the rest of the way home with my hip.)
Though occasionally you saw a cart far far away from a supermarket, where someone had basically stolen it, either teenagers to have fun, or someone asocial who, I don't know, used to carry all the shopping home? I don't really know what they did with it.
And it was the cost of replacing those stolen carts that drove the adaption of the coin operation system. Not that people just left them in the parking lot. Some supermarkets also tried a system where the cart locked if you moved it out of range of some radio in the supermarket, but that one really didn't take off.
(Also, quite a few people in Germany just do shopping by walking or biking to the supermarket).
And now they are again. Some new REWE carts already come without this feature.
The only thing that's useful about those things is that it's easier to get them faster.
While you're shopping? That's not a big deal.
When you return the cart? How are you driving home without your keys?
I guess Europeans might be more likely to not take a car to the grocery store, but I would prefer to use a basket over a cart while shopping in that case... I'll know when I'm done shopping when the basket hits my limit of how much to hand carry.
I also expect Aldi management isn't thrilled about homeless people camping outside their stores.
You have to read between the lines on why that is so.
> Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
An enterprising 10 year old could rack a few bucks sometimes.
> Is this a US phenomenon
Yeah, you can kind of do whatever you want here. It's sort of our thing
Also it seems to be our thing to have an unbounded number of assholes who do stuff like throw rental scooters in rivers.
Here its mostly teens who throw rental escooters into rivers.
Asking for the same reason I asked OP my question. I was just in Berlin and, second only to Tokyo, I've never* seen such conscientious group of people, including teens.
* I'd actually place two other cities from that trip into the same #2 position: Zurich and Vienna.
Some links:
(2025) 300+ e-scooters recovered from the Spree (river in Berlin) by Spree:publik activist Jan Ebel: https://www.morgenpost.de/bezirke/treptow-koepenick/article4...
(2024) Readers of "Neue Rottweiler Zeitung" mention e-scooters in the Neckar: https://www.nrwz.de/rottweil/e-scooter-laufen-gut-in-rottwei...
(2021) 500+ e-scooters were thrown from the Hohenzollern bridge into the Rhine: https://www.golem.de/news/mikromobilitaet-im-rhein-liegen-hu...
(2021) Dozens of e-scooters in the Main: https://www.fnp.de/frankfurt/chaoten-werfen-scooter-einfach-...
However, shopping carts SuCk on anything but smooth cement.
The answer to this question is always “no”. Regardless of the subject. Basically 100% of the time.
At my local grocery store everyone returns their carts. In the other place in the US I lived 10 years ago, there were loose carts everywhere.
The US is a very, very big country. Really more like 50 big countries. With huge variation in culture, income, background, etc. There’s barely anything you can say that applies to the whole country, regardless of the subject.
Just one variable: the Jerk Scale.
It is a US phenomenom yes. When it exists in other countries it's because of Hollywood exporting american culture.
Where did the USA import cart culture from? Mexico?
It seems likely to me that many countries are capable of domestically manufacturing selfish assholes.
Almost everyone returns them in all the supermarkets in my area.
It is sort of amazing and uplifting to see a whole society with a high level of good behavior.
- People trim their bushes and trees (they frequently look like Dr. Seuss trees)
- The sidewalks are clean, even in the most urban environments
- I've seen women leave their purse on the table when they go to the bathroom.
- People wait to cross the street
- Cars are carefully parked and aligned inside the lines
- People wait in line
- stores are well organized
It is true that grocery packages are much smaller than the US (since Japanese houses, even in the countryside, are smaller and I guess the average household size is smaller as wel). Shopping carts in regular supermarkets are smaller than abroad, and are usually built to house 1 or 2 shopping baskets you can also carry by hand.
But hey, we still have Costco in Japan, and package sizes and shopping cart sizes are just as big as they are in the US (although the parking lot is probably considerably more crowded). And Costco is extremely popular here. It's far messier than a Japanese supermarket and I do see inconsiderate people sometimes in Costco, but the cars are still parked nicely and most people do return their shopping carts. It would be interesting to compare Costcos in Japan and the US directly though.
It’s not authoritarian to have a sensible set of laws that you enforce rigorously, backed by soft norms that are only enforced through social customs. Yet in the US we seem to want the inversion of this, legal enforcement of social norms with weak enforcement of hard laws. Very strange.
You get your waist and height measured as part of your routine health examination every year since you become a worker. Eyes, hearing, etc are also included. Its just your body's "metrics".
Your company CAN look at these (they rarely care to), but they can't fire you for them - you especially aren't fined over it. Japan is an incredibly hard country to fire or penalize workers. They can only check them in the first place because its the company that pays for these screenings in most cases. Free EKG, blood screens, and other basic health marker checks.
I'm so tired of people spreading orientalist crap about this country on the internet.
It's a rare example of a working high-trust society.
I knew a special needs teacher when I was younger who would make this argument, but it was specifically because he worked with kids who had a history of crime, as so the argument was specifically that we need jobs for people who can't be trusted with either money or food. He would suggest not cleaning up after yourself at a fast food restaurant specifically because trash/bussing was effectively the only jobs these kids and young adults could get.
I never felt convinced that this was an effective strategy, I follow the logic, but within the logic is the assumption that putting these kids to work is a better outcome than using that capital to try and improve their situation/behavior. I honestly don't know which choice is more optimal or whether people can really change en masse.
>within the logic is the assumption that putting these kids to work is a better outcome than using that capital to try and improve their situation/behavior.
Sounds like your teacher would be great in politics. "creates jobs" is much easier sell than reformation.
I'd rather fix our broken windows than pretend that some people are "destined" to stay as minimum wage workers instead of aspiring to their passions. But those can't be done in a single term.
Here, the business wouldn't care. It would be the costumers, who would find it inconvenient, and would need to return other carts, if they want to.
Anyways, there is no shortage of necessary low skill labor that can be done unrelated to food or money.
Employees got to pull those carts in by their bootstraps
CartNarc videos are selected for the reaction of the subject. Many videos where the subject just returned their cart or didn't get sufficiently agitated end up on the cutting room floor. It isn't a representative sample, there is heavy selection bias. No conclusions can be drawn from them despite the attempts of the author.
It isn't even "somewhat" scientific as the author states.
At Kroger, they have these shopping carts that locks their wheels if they were to be taken too far from the store. Well, sometimes they just lock without any reason, so what does the person do as they grab one as they're entering the store an it's locked? They just leave it there, and pull the next one.
And over time, the Kroger entrance is just full of shopping carts that are locked and every customer that comes in gets agitated because all the initial carts they interact with are locked.
1) always return the shopping cart when it's free (it almost never is)
2) rarely return the shopping cart when it's paid - sorry but I value my time more than €1 it cost to rent the cart, and, well, clearly there's no "social contract" - there's an "explicit contract", which says "you rent the cart for €1 and we refund you if you return it" so clearly not returning it is fine (also, someone could earn €1!)
It's like littering in a park vs not throwing your trash in the bin at a fast food restaurant. One is more of a commons that everyone has responsibility to clean up. The other is a private establishment who will clean up after guests if they don't. I'd rather just be clean regardless but I see the perspective.
Very common and widespread in the UK across all social classes. It is done purely altruistically (you will save a life) and the NHS makes life easier by providing pop-up donation clinics in shopping centres and works car parks.
In the US, people are paid to donate blood (!). This makes the whole transaction feel scummy and is, unsurprisingly, something many people avoid doing leaving only the poor to donate for money.
I agree, but there are some advantages to donating blood regularly. It's a free blood-iron check, they also screen for various diseases and it's probably the most effective way of reducing microplastics in your blood. Also, there's the chance that you might need a blood transfusion yourself, so while you won't be getting your donation back, it means that there's more chance that your blood type will be available if you donate.
If your interpretation is true, wouldn't the shop need to have someone there to return all the unreturned carts? I have never seen such a person. Of course, if carts are in the parking lot, eventually an employee might come to return them, but it's not the intended way of handling it.
The 1€ is a deposit, and you lose it if you fail to do what is right, but the social contract to return the cart is still there, just because money is involved, doesn't mean all ethical considerations go out of the window. Returning it is still the right thing to do. The 1€ is there as an incentive for those who would just not return it if it wouldn't cost them.
First example I heard of this shift was with daycares that had trouble getting parents to pick up their kids on time, so they put a fine on it for having to stay late. This ended up increasing the problem because now there was compensation instead of guilt, and parents could make the decision that the cost was worth it.
I assume it's like the bottle deposit. If enough people leave a coin in the cart and walk away someone will start returning them of their own volition just to earn the coins.
Nobody who does this is not aware that returning the shopping card is the normal, expected, and 'right' behavior. There just isn't a moral hazard that prevents them from doing the wrong behavior.
I think there is a larger philosophical/moral question of WHY should someone do the 'right' thing in the absense of a moral hazard. It's something I've thought a lot about over the last couple of years.
As the 4chan Shopping car theory points out, the cost of leaving the cart is zero. And the benefit is the saved time/energy. Why shouldn't a rational self-optimizing person leave the cart there? Why shouldn't they hold the subway door open to catch the train? Why shouldn't they pull up the very front of the offramp and merge at the last second? Zero cost, all benefit.
I have a self-motto of 'do the right thing' in virtually anything I do. In those examples, I'd return the carts, wouldn't hold a train door open, and would miss an exit and turn around.
But WHY do I do it? Why do I feel like I HAVE to do it? Am I actually experiencing any benefit in life over those who don't?
(Just so nobody misunderstands me, this is not to say that I want more cameras and security officers. Quite the opposite, which is why I don’t like casual antisocial behavior and petty crime.)
If I try to dig in deeper for why I also feel that way, I guess it's not about coercion or fear of judgement/retribution. I just have an innate understanding that other people have their own lives, and I don't feel like it's worth it to do things that have a minuscule "benefit" for me while being a far outweighed drawback for multiple strangers. Even though it doesn't benefit me, it does benefit the community I'm in, and is one of many things that make the society I live in relatively nice.
Not returning the shopping cart saves a rounding error's worth of time, but now multiple car drivers are annoyed in a major way when shopping carts are rolling back and forth, ramming into parked cars or taking up empty parking spots. Employees now have to spend more of their time getting all the carts, sometimes in bad weather. Not worth it.
Holding the subway door saves several minutes for me, but makes the schedule tighter for the operator and forces hundreds of people to wait a few more seconds for me. This difference between my benefit and others' drawback isn't as drastic as the shopping carts, so the bar for me to do it is lower (I would probably do it if trains were >10 minutes apart). But it also has a sketchy feeling to it - I'd trust that the train will remain stopped, but the chance of you getting caught on the side of a moving train is >0%. It has happened many times before, especially in older systems.
I don't see what the benefit is for leaving a highway at the last possible second. If anything, this erratic behavior is unexpected and is more likely to lead to an accident. Not worth it, even discounting any feelings you have for other people.
In large metro areas, exit lanes can be back up, usually because there is a light at the end of the exit. For instance, exit 32 on the BQE can backup to the point that you sit in the exit lane for 10+ minutes as batches of cars move through the intersection. To circumvent the wait, some people just pull up to the front of the exit lane and merge in and go through the next next batch of lights. A lot of people will try to prevent you from merging, but someone will always eventually let you through. It's called exit lane jumping. It's illegal but I highly doubt anyone gets pulled over for it.
You start to skip the little things in life and it creeps up into the big things. "Do I have to return the shopping cart?" "Do I have to cook tonight?" "Do I have to shower today?" "Do I have to acknowledge that chatty neighbor and instead just walk past him?".
When your care starts to slip about participating in society, you start to disassociate with society. And I think times like these are where we need to care more than ever about participating.
We intuitively understand that society experiences the greatest collective benefit when people generally cooperate. We also understand that while defecting (i.e. behaving in a selfish and anti-social way) might benefit us more as individuals, that's only true so long as others aren't also defecting. If they do, not only is society worse off but you personally are worse off as well than if everybody cooperated. And we understand that personally defecting leads to others doing the same.
Leaving your cart randomly in the parking lot, holding the train door open, or cutting across traffic may optimize your personal outcome, but the more people who behave like you the worse your grocery store parking lot experience gets, the more delayed your train is, and the longer you're stuck in traffic.
The nuance here is that modern societies are large enough that you can buy into the idea that your personal behavior does not influence the behavior of others in a way that will come back around to bite you. In a large metro area, what is the probability that the driver you cut off will be in a position to cut you off tomorrow? Ignoring the fact that society is smaller than you think when you look at sub groups like people who regularly drive on a certain road at a certain time, you have to consider second and third order effects. If cutting people off in traffic leads to more people cutting each other off in traffic, the impact spreads until it could easily come back around to your personal traffic experience with a few degrees of separation.
Fundamentally I think rational self-optimizing people realize that shitty personal behavior leads if only in a small way to the overall enshitification of society and that sooner or later this will come back around to negatively impact them personally. The people who engage in such behavior anyways aren't more rationally self-optimizing, they're either too stupid to see the connection or nihilistic enough to not care.
States that are “too polite” to do it have to remind people to do it.
You are not supposed to block your lane of traffic because you didn't want to wait like everyone else.
But that does open the door to a very interesting question (far outside of the scope of this discussion): would people change their habits of brushing their teeth if that hazard didn't exist, e.g. your dental repairs were free? D:
The original article and many of the comments have a hugely moralistic tone - where are people expected to learn these implicit rules? If the store doesn’t care enough to communicate these expectations (assuming they even have them, and that they don’t only exist in the minds of the self-appointed “cart police”), why should customers follow them?
The rules are not implicit; there are typically giant signs saying "RETURN CART HERE" over a metal cart corral that often contains other carts.
People are expected to learn this during their first or second trip to a grocery store that offers carts.
Similarly, at a full-service restaurant, you will be able to notice busboys picking up used tableware, and you will notice a scarcity of customer-accessible garbage bins (as compared to, say, a self-service fast-food restaurant).
If you are ever unsure of the protocol, you are always welcome to ask an employee. Employees at these businesses are typically distinguished by wearing a uniform.
Hope these tips help you on your future trips to Kroger/McDonald's/Olive Garden.
If by returning my cart I was helping the employees, I'd be inclined to go out of my way to do so. But actually all I'm doing is helping the business, who is trying to cut as many employees as possible (talking about big stores like Walmart, Target, not some small local grocery that might even be employee owned).
That would be a great way to fight the business, which would love to employ fewer people to clean that stuff up by shifting the burden of doing it right onto you, the customer.
And, in fact, you almost certainly are helping employees. Sure, there could be fewer of them, but they'd be doing less menial work. And the ones who got laid off due to your contentiousness would find less menial work elsewhere. Society as a whole would benefit.
You probably already know this, but the idea that we should make the world worse to preserve people's jobs is called the broken-windows fallacy.
I probably should have just responded with that originally.
My acquaintances in food service tell me they appreciate the thought, but rather you not go through the effort.
https://www.businessinsider.com/waitress-on-tiktok-shows-dif...
With regard to carts, because they roll around, into cars, and cause damage. Leaving your cart loose in the lot is a great way to damage other people's vehicles. The first ding in my first new car was caused by a loose cart some asshole left in the lot while I was shopping.
I don't think many people would object to full-service cart return, in which employees immediately pick up your cart when a customer is finished loading their groceries into the car. But few (if any?) stores actually intend to offer that, as evidenced by the carts that sit for long periods of time strewn about the parking area.
In my experience, someone that needs to be taught rules like that, at an age old enough to be pushing around their own shopping cart, is lost forever anyway. All it takes is half a second of considering what might go on with that cart after you leave it.
In France people return their carts. Some carts have coins, some don't but they are vastly, vastly returned.
Coins were introduced in France in the 80s (I still remember my parents pondering about that). The reason was not really that people would not return the carts, but rather to incenive them not to take them away.
People would sometimes (not a massive trend ) ride the cart home and then hope for the best.
This has today completely disappeared but the coins are still there in most of the shops.
And instituting the deposits worked and you seem to be suggesting that the current existence of deposits is somehow vestigial and unrelated to the continuing discouragement of stealing carts?
The vast, vast majority of people here will bring their cart back, deposit or not. There are some b ok eck sheep but you will see maybe 2 carts left in a whole large parking lot (if at all). This is not a matter of deposit anymore, you can get coins at the reception desk.
So the problem of leaving the cats was not one we needed to solve.
People taking the carts - yes. It was just a small fraction, but enough for the shops to take action. They betted on there fact that 1 or 2 francs (this was before the euro) wrote be enough to deter people from yelling the carts with them. And it worked. And it pissed of the best majority that was not doing it. Today everyone is used to the system so it stayed.
I think (but this is just a personal opinion) that having the carts locked helps with their bulk transport
Living in small town rural America today, it’s just not a problem, folks simply don’t do it. The only exception to that statement is you will occasionally see a very elderly and infirm customer leaving their cart in the non-parking portions of the handicap parking. Of course you’ll also see just as many folks taking those carts with them inside. It’s a nice little balance. Perhaps coincidentally this area is very calm and very low crime.
Imagine a business that didn't periodically fetch their carts. The parking lot would be a hazard of loose carts, and the store would run out of carts for customers. So the store will have to do it anyway.
Returning a cart is a courtesy -- one where it is very visible (temporarily) when the courtesy has not been extended.
Personally, I return carts - because when I worked in a service job, I always had more "important" things to do than clean up after slob customers.
Most of the time I will leave my cart inside and carry my bags to the car. I use the small carts and they run out a lot, so I like to leave it there for other people who like the small carts.
Stores in the US provide a lot of services to shoppers; bagging groceries, taking them out to your car for you, etc. I don't see why collecting your cart can't be part of that. The exception here is stores like dollar tree, where employees are treated like absolute trash by corporate.
The tech equivalent of this is "registers and RAM are so fast, why can't the Har drive just be all RAM?"
Baging groceries is centralized in a specific spot. Taking groceries out is a rare task you can expend a few employees for. Having people dedicated to collecting every single cart in real time is expensive. At that point it's easier to designate a garbage collection time and make laps around the property .
Know what's super annoying and time consuming? Facing product. Yet no one gives people shit because they don't face product after they take it and expect employees to do it. The cart thing is just mental gymnastics to make people feel like they have self worth and are better than others. Ya single young dude, you're so much better than the mom with the bum knee and two kids that put her cart off to the side rather than taking it to the corral.
There's a million such services provided for you when you shop at a grocery store, wrangling carts is an extremely minor one.
There is, but at that point you're in luxury stores and probably aren't pushing the carts yourself anymore to begin with.
>You have to be out there getting them from the corral anyway
Yes, and the idea of "returning a shopping cart" includes corrals too. That'd the crux of the argument here, people can't even find spots down and put it in the corral.
>The cart thing is just mental gymnastics to make people feel like they have self worth and are better than others.
I can't speak for everyone. But I see it as an exercise in self reflection and tending to your environment. Youre not a better person for doing so, but you contribute to a worse environment if the care isn't there. These little things add up to a broken society.
The mentality that we all need to constantly compare ourselves to one another is in fact another community building exercise. And why hyper individualism is doomed to fail. I simply want to try and understand why the windows are broken and try to take steps to fix it.
1. Ones an obligation, the other is a duty. The metaphor is about what little things a person does to contribute to society, not what someone is paid to do
2. Unless your full time job is collecting shopping carts, leaving time windows for carts to crash into cars or people or blocking parking spots is what makes the broken window. Picking up the glass shards is something, but not everything when a frsutrated shopper never comes back.
And since I see more confusion here, keep in mind that the US has several shopping cart carrals at any major store. Those corrals still count as "returning your shopping cart". I don't think the article is asking people to put it back in the store. I haven't seen that expectation in the modern day
Here in the States, when I go to the store I don't just face the aisles -- I do it right and make sure I pull all of the product forward, and that it's all facing the right way all the way back. I check the dates and rotate stock where that's necessary. If stock is running low of an item, I make a note of that.
And I don't mean just for the stuff I touch -- I do it all. There's a glorious spectacle of unbridled order on the supermarket shelves that are left in my wake.
After I'm done shopping, I bag my own groceries and roll them out to the car in the cart. And then I return the cart and any others I see all the way back to the front of the store for shoppers to use directly so that nobody else is burdened by this task.
And since I'm already back to the store, I find a drymop and make a quick pass of every aisle, while making a note of anything wet or sticky. The wet stuff gets flagged right away for safety, and both the wet stuff and the sticky stuff gets a solid scrub with a wet mop.
When I return the mop bucket I check the backstock against my notes for anything that was running low, and bring that out and shelve it so other customers are best assured of a good selection.
After I close and wash down the deli, I make one final check of the cooler temperatures and I thank every single employee by name for helping me today. I feel like I should be thanking them each at least thrice per visit for all of their hard work, but I don't want to appear to be over-appreciative.
And -- finally! -- on my way out, I vacuum the rugs in the entryway. On my watch, not even a footprint is left behind.
I don't know why more people aren't like this. We all know that in a truly functional society, it is everyone's job to help out.
I really wish I could do more, but I only have time to run the floor machine, sort produce, and help the manager with scheduling on Wednesdays and Sundays.
(I guess some people are just indefensibly narcissistic or something.)
Then again, they still have to go out to the cart return areas to collect them which takes time, so in that sense leaving carts around just makes their job a bit harder. Hmm. Not sure now!
I assume the issue is apparent.
What a strange accusation when the second sentence in the article is...
> One cart was wedged into a curb, another sat toppled over in a parking spot, a third drifted like a metal tumbleweed across the lot
The reason people put carts away is to avoid the obvious issues caused by not putting carts away...
But most people hate it, so my wife and I try to show consideration.
FWIW, the cart itself can serve as a mobility aid for some types of disabilities. So the hard part might be walking back alone from returning the cart, and that person might view abandoned carts next to open parking spots as a good thing for where they themselves want to park to minimize the cartless walking. I'm certainly not trying to justify the overall trend, just talking about this one particular example.
If someone has vertigo that does not allow them to push a cart for few meters, then maybe this same vertigo means they shouldnt drive a car at all.
Because they can cause an accident and kill themselves, or others.
When my kid was a baby, I used to worry that someone might think I'm abandoning him or leaving him in a car unattended when walking the cart back (no one else with me), but it never became a concern unless the weather was too hot. I never did figure out how "leaving kids unattended" laws worked out with returning a shopping cart where the nearest corral was half way across the parking lot.
Take the cart with child to the car.
Unload the groceries, return the cart and child to the corral.
Remove child and return to the car.
If this is not possible the child is large enough to survive half a minute unsupervised or you have to park next to a corral anyway (since you couldn’t bring the child to the store to get a cart).
That is also exclusively an US problem, and sounds quite insane to my european mind.
The 360x4 casters are pretty insane the first time you realize it.
As someone who went there alone, this was a real problem. The setup really assumes at least two people are showing up. One to wait with the purchased items, and another to get the car.
I’ve avoided IKEA because of this. I don’t know how to deal with it logistically.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/jc0az4/...
My memory was decent!
We do have small parking lots here, and many carts have a coin deposit mechanism. It's not just that we're a morally superior people.
Only one store near me has a coin deposit: Aldi which has European roots - it has probably never occurred to them to check if the cost of the coin collectors is worth it (I'm sure it adds $5 to the cost of a $300 cart). Every other store finds people return their carts often enough that it isn't worth the bother to put those in place.
Of course the coin thing somewhat relies on coins of mentionable value being in common circulation, which rules out the US from the start.
Here few people still carry coins since contactless, but most still have a fake euro coin somewhere on their keyring or in their car for shopping carts.
They hand out these fake coins, which are usually branded with the supermarket's logo, for free inside the shop. But the system still works because having to go inside for a new coin negates the saved effort of not bringing back the cart. And there's probably some feeling of discomfort associated with abandoning the cart with your coin still in it.
The US $.25 coin is similar in size to the .50 euro coin (about half the value). It is in common circulation and most people still have them. Most people I know keep a stack of them in their car for use in the carts.
However...
On the way in to the store, I habitually take one of those "stranded" carts outside the corral. Thus saving employee labor. I do that all the time. So by my thinking I'm actually running a positive karma balance here. I'm probably at like a 10:1 lifetime ratio.
Because you need the stability of the cart (as a walker aid) itself.
Maybe getting from the car to the cart is worth the effort, but returning the cart is not worth the effort of getting back to the car.
I'm not just being imaginative for the sake of argument. One of my parents does exactly this.
I do thank you for not saying "begs the question"! ;)
The amount of car traffic you are exposed as a pedestrian is way larger, that the few minutes in a parking lot are a rounding error. Also on a parking lot, there are a lot of pedestrians, so car drivers will drive even more carefully then on any random street, where pedestrians can also walk around at any time.
I also didn't see any post-cart interview of people that returned the cart.
As it is I found it a waste of 2 minutes reading time. It's not somewhat scientific at all.
An employee somewhat angrily explained to me that I was threatening his job because collecting carts and greeting customers was part of the Publix customer experience.
"I SAID, HAVE A NICE DAY SIR!"
(just in case you live in a civilized part of the world, understand: this was in a place where the checker doesn't lift a finger to bag your groceries, that's your job)
If I take a cart into the store I'll walk out with a full one. If I take a basket, I'll walk out with a full one. If I take nothing, I'll walk out with my hands full.
I'd rather buy a hands-full worth of stuff than a cart-full.
ALDI solved this problem, even in the U.S. Their carts only work with quarters, so people go back to the cart area to get their quarters back. Maybe we should get the dollar coins circulated more so every cart in the U.S. uses those to encourage people to move their carts back. Quarters might not work everywhere in the U.S.. They probably would justify leaving their carts even more now because they will think: "Hey, next person gets a free quarter, it is better to leave it, I help someone to make money now".
An interesting phenomenon. I will always return a Walmart cart but rarely if ever return an airport cart; probably because I love finding one “for free” and pass it on.
I have one store near me that does that - we buy most of our groceries there because they are close and cheap (Aldi is cheaper, but everyone else is more expensive)
When I see someone returning a cart I scream “job killer!”
My wife had a couple of joint replacements a few years back, and for a time she availed herself of a motorized cart where available. I LOVED driving these back into the store, and I got indignant when a staffer tried to offer to take it in for me.
One time I was approached by a kid who I swear to you, looked just like Morty Smith, offering to take the motor cart back. A little skit formed in my head, which I related to my wife on the car ride back home:
Morty: Aw, geez, I could—I could take that back for you, sir.
Rick: Oh no you don't. Mario Karting this thing back into the store is the most fun I get to have on our weekly grocery trip. How DARE you try to take that from me.
They're made by 'Gatekeeper' which is even better.
You're only supposed to move 25 carts at a time with one of those, and we used to get videos from stores that we serviced where the employees would regularly see how many carts they could get that thing to move at one time...
I’ve seen those trains sticking so far out of a target it’d make Union Pacific blush.
Yet you'll find any number of posts from people saying "I've got my kids in the car so I'm not returng my cart". But didn't you have your kids with you when you went into the store? Can't you unload your cart, return it then walk you and your kids back to your car?
This is (IMHO) one of the worst cultural norms in America: people want to be celebrated for largely pointless selfish actions as some kind of virtuous display of their rights. Often being community-minded requires very little from individuals. You're not a hero for bucking that norm.
For the record I generally bring back my cart, but I’d stand behind someone who wanted to hurl it into the middle of the lot, at least at one of the grocery oligarchs.
Hell, a few times the victim has been someone with a visible mobility disability and they kept on harassing.
Imagine you’re in a hurry. Your child is tired and hungry, and you are too. You’ve just loaded the groceries into the trunk and finally gotten your child strapped into the car seat. You think for just a moment that you're done. But then you realize: you still need to return the shopping cart. You should have loaded the groceries, locked the car, gone back to the cart return and then carried your child back to the car to load them into their car seat.
Now you’re faced with a dilemma with three bad options — do you take your child back out of the car, leave them unattended for a moment, or abandon the cart and go home?
My god, people act like there's kidnappers at every grocery store just waiting for this one moment to abduct a child.
When I read this I thought you meant bad parents not teaching their kids to return their carts
> dilemma... do you...
What exactly is the risk of leaving the kid while you quickly return the cart?
But what I'm offering is that if I saw a parent leaving a cart, I wouldn't judge and assume that it's because of a glaring moral failing.
It's not a moral failing by itself, but it then suggests "how many other activities are cut out because they can't take their eyes off their kids for 30 seconds?" That behavior seeps into the rest of the going ons in life.
That's not bad, but I wouldn't be surprised if that becomes the type of parent who cuts all social contact with non-parent friends after having a kid.
Feels like a lazy justification
I try to give people kindness and grace, even for small things. Maybe we can sometimes reframe a "lost cart" as something other than an act of laziness or aggression against society. Maybe it’s a sign someone was just having a hard moment.
When I take a stray cart back, sure, it could’ve been left by someone careless. But it also could’ve been left by someone overwhelmed. Maybe a parent, an exhausted worker, someone barely holding it together because of some struggle we'll never know.
Returning that cart might be a tiny act of kindness toward someone who needed it that day.
Menards corrals are literally carports they sell in the store (and hence covered which is nice).
I think they don't have dividers because they also take the large lumber carts, too.
Home Depot also has no dividers, probably for the same reason.
https://www.menards.com/main/outdoors/sheds-accessories/carp...
Of course, Menards sells entire houses (in kit form): https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/the-project-...
And milk. https://www.menards.com/main/grocery-home/grocery/dairy-eggs...
I don't know, in 90s Germany my parents just let me wait in the car for a minute and there was only the radio I could listen to. In elementary school I just walked to school even in darkness. And in high school I walked 15 minutes to the bus. That was the time when some middle class parents started bringing their children to the bus with the car, but for most of the other children is was normal to just walk.
But yeah times change. My grand-parents walked 10 km by foot to school on the street on 6 days per week after war.
The real problem is the people who take them 3 blocks away and don't return them. More stores are using those wheels that lock up using various technologies when they are taken outside of the store property.
Do you mean leave it in one of the designated areas? Or are you just leaving shopping carts in the middle of the parking lot?
Just return the cart.
It's very strange that people think the same courtesy should not be extended to shopping carts.
What's so bad about it? We had a great meal at [place], might as well help the overwhelmed person working minimum wage by giving them some breathing space.
Put the cart back man.
This satisfies the golden rule. I want the person on the table before me to do a reasonable effort to keep the table clean. And I will do it for the next person.
Halve the price, don't force a tip, and give me some cleaner. I'll do it.
by the way, I do try to do my best to wipe off excess sauce and put large crumbs onto the plates. I'm not going to leave my table oozing with ketchup. It's the same logic of cleaning up before professional cleaners come in.