I assume it's generally unbecoming to reference 4chan posts for an academic but surprised the Shopping Cart theory didn't get a mention given how close it was to the subject matter.
>“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.”
My completely unqualified opinion is that this kind of behaviour is linked directly to intellectual ability. Returning the cart requires self-discipline but also implies a thought process around upholding and creating social order. Even fear of shame implies a desire to uphold social standing with others.
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.
I strongly doubt it is related to intellectual ability but cultural expectations.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
Wow. Can you give some more geographical context on where this happened and where the girl is from? (Obviously, not revealing personal details)
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)
There's a minority of people wealthy enough to grease everything with money or really powerful connections. In a conversation involving people doing their own shopping and eating at places where you are presumed to take your tray to the bin I wasn't even thinking about them.
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!”
> 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.
> 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.
I fully acknowledge their existence. I'm sure I most certainly engage into equivalent antisocial behavior in some way or another wherever I most lack awareness, and my sole point is that, for most of us, when we are doing that, we dumb.
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.
I don't really think you understand my point. It isn't simple antisocial behavior. It's a multi-generational learned belief in a hierarchical class structure which will persist so long as enough people reject equality and solidarity, and instead actively protect their class privilege. (In modern parlance, "anti-woke" is roughly the opposite of "check your privilege").
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.
A lot of it has to be education too, for exemple in some cultures the outside, ie outside your own place, is seen as more or less a giant trash, so people see no problem dumping their shit even right in front of their own building. In my culture the outside is seen as a common shared place and definitely not a trash, I remember my grandpa telling me not to spit on the ground or to pick up my candy wrappers when I was maybe 4 or 5 years old.
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
To me that blows my mind, not because of viewing the outside as trash, but being content with living in trash. To me the observation, that the outside is a giant trash, would give me a desire to order it.
I have heard this opinion echoed by Indians, the combination of both the outside not being their problem, and thinking someone else (lower caste) will take care of it.
There are city workers and occasionally homeless people who pickup trash (to salvage or sell). I'm not sure how this opinion of theirs is formed but I can assure you nobody is throwing around trash with anything remotely caste related in their mind. It isn't even in consideration.
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.
I'm talking about people spitting in front of the elevator doors, people opening their mail in the common building area and immediately throwing the envelope on the floor, people finishing their drink in front of the building and discarding the bottle by the side of the entrance door
We don't need alien tech to solve these, it's 100% an education issue.
They should be educated, sure, but this can't be an education issue. Rather an issue of crappy upbringing and low intellect or, when it's a cultural thing, crappy culture.
This depends if you only understand learning in school to be education, or if you mean the whole education that a pupil underwent, which I think was the case here. To me upbringing is another word for education.
That makes sense, but sometimes it's even more confusing than that!
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)
I tend to reduce this even further: you as a person are either fundamentally capable of considering (and caring about) how your actions affect others, or you aren't.
You can draw a pretty clear line across about half of america with this standard. It's depressing.
It is truly a marker of good vs bad people as
far as it comes to participating in a high trust
society.
Here's an even better test, if you ask me.
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.
I try to grab an outside shopping cart to leave the world slightly less chaotic than when I entered; which is all we can do in life, perhaps.
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 try to grab an outside shopping cart to leave the world slightly less chaotic than when I entered; which is all we can do in life, perhaps
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.
* 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.
From what I can see, it's not about higher throughput (which stays the same)
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.
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.
If there is a right turn only lane, and a straight lane, and the right turn only lane is backed up with people queuing, you are not making traffic go faster by merging in at the last second. You are slowing down a bunch of people trying to turn, and blocking the people trying to go straight.
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.
Yeah, as someone living in Germany, returning shopping carts sounds like a non-issue. The only case where people don't return shopping carts are homeless people, who use it to store there personal belongings. So it's deliberate and they do not litter the world with shopping carts, but actively use them.
> I stopped even though I agree it is the right thing to do because I felt like a fool every time I did it... why should I be the sucker who does it?
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.
Perhaps I'm reading this too literally, but "on average?" This is a very flawed society, but I don't think I've ever seen the rando stranded carts equalling or outnumbering the returned ones.
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.
bypassing a long queue of cars only to merge into the lane
at the last possible second
While again not doubting that US is worse than many other countries, I wonder if some amount of this is due to our uh, organically sprawling road system. Because I have definitely been one of the people doing this at times, but it was always due to quite honestly misunderstanding what lane I needed to be in.
Anecdotally I've heard that our drivers are nowhere near the worst, but I don't have firsthand experience.
Does it have anything to do with US parking lots being huge? I usually ship at Lidl, so the parking lot can hold maybe 50 cars. It takes 1 minute to return the cart, and there's usually a car parked next to me, so there isn't actually space to leave it (unless I'm an asshole and leave it in front of another car).
When there are large parking lots, there are multiple cart return areas scattered throughout the lot. Otherwise things would be really inefficient, to an even more nightmarish (and money-costing) degree.
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.
America is very big and diverse, and local culture varies wildly. You can go to a Whole Foods store in one part of a city and almost everyone returns their carts there, and then you can go to a Walmart in another part of the city and it looks like something out of a zombie movie, with carts and trash littering the parking lot.
It's derived from the "how do you treat the waiter" test in first dates, so it's not like this came from nowhere. Your small actions where "it doesn't matter" can have surprising revelations on your overall disposition in life. e.g., if you're reaction to being asked about a shopping cart is violence, that says a lot about how you treat many confrontations in your life.
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.
> it is more likely to cause them to spit in your food than it is to get you better service.
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?
>What? It is hardly any extra work, you also have walked the same way when taking the cart.
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.
This whole category of decision making basically consists of taking observable things and then using them to infer other things despite the correlations often only being barely better than a coin toss. It's the same logic by which the police harass you more if you check more bad demographic checkboxes.
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.
I worked at a grocery store for a while in my teens and early twenties. It is really a surprise to me that this has become an internet topic and even more surprising how strongly people feel like it is a litmus test for good vs bad. I just do not think it is a good litmus test. People are busy, some people have kids. Who is really being inconvenienced?
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.
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.
There's a pretty fundamental difference between additional low priority but necessary busy work for a salaried employee and one of the better tasks you get to do as a min-wage retail employee.
Back when I worked in retail, my car was dented multiple times from people not putting carts in the designated areas.
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.
Same re: grocery work and liking getting carts as a teen.
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.'
If everyone did it then you'd probably have a dedicated person to fetch the carts doing that basically throughout their shift. The store still needs the carts for more shoppers and with everyone putting them in the grass that process ends up taking longer.
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".
Yeah and if everyone was littering all the time, the city might employ more dustmen. Or they would say screw it, why waste money and time, when the citizens obviously don't want to live in a clean city.
Ah yes. It's pouring rain, blowing cold wind in your face, kids are screaming and hitting each other, you stubbed your toe into cart and generally just having bad day. What would jesus do?
Is the standard to return the cart or not? Where do you draw the line? What if it’s only raining? How hard does it need to be raining to sacrifice your principles?
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.
I've had bad days. I still managed not to be a net negative on my environment. Why can't you? Why can't other people? From my perspective, how you behave when you're having a bad day is the real litmus test. If you're still a decent person then, then you actually have values you care about, that you don't just follow when convenient.
Theoretically, in this case, the agonizing "It's pouring rain, blowing cold wind in your face, kids are screaming and hitting each other, you stubbed your toe into cart and generally just having bad day" scenario making any man unable to manage the extra-harrowing effort of directing a cart a few meters into a designated space.
I feel like the recent and strange habit of people telling me, unprompted, all about their assorted minor medical maladies, syndromes, and treatments -- is a form of "I don't always do the right thing because of these tribulations that I suffer"
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.
I worked at a grocery store as well and we didn’t even have a place to return carts. Even after I got moved up to doing stock, I told the manager I’d be happy to go get carts, especially in the winter when no one else wanted to do it. I thought it was fun to go out there and slide around on them.
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.
I talked to a guy who used to run a grocery store. There were low-income housing apartment buildings nearby. People would walk to the store, buy groceries, and then just roll the damn carts back to their buildings down the street.
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.
As a fellow former grocery store employee, I can agree about the “break up the monotony” concept from the narrow POV of the bored worker.
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
> 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 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!
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).
If you have kids, you let them return the cart, because it is fun for them and already start to move the car out of the parking lot. That way you save even more time.
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.
This isn't exclusively about whether it inconveniences employees or not. I was also a grocery store worker and I would also enjoy cart getting in certain weather but I wouldn't want to do it at, for example, walmart. That's practically a contact sport.
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.
I hold a strong but unproven belief that a minority of people who are naturally more conscientious than ordinary are basically holding the world together at the seams.
I have the inverted belief that most people are actually doing all right most of the time, but it's the squeaky wheels that stand out from the crowd and draw my attention all day long. There's just too many man-hours elapsed per day for a true minority to keep it stumbling along as gracefully as it does. We all have our bad days.
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.
Somebody's got to, and I've got a little extra time, so I guess I will.
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 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.
Walmarts around me seem to have a corral every ten or so cars, hordes of them. I still encounter strays and that’s with them seeming having a dedicated cart cowboy (with his little train).
I once calculated the number of carts Walmart has worldwide and it was mind-boggling.
Are kids really the excuse? I was putting away the cart basically as early as I remember. It was extremely fun to do that as a kid. Ride the cart like a kick scooter then BANG slam it into the rack with the others.
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.
Actually glad to hear that. I always wondered if it was pure entitlement and laziness to walk past a loaded corral and then take a car at the entrance.
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.
Imagine, if you will, a society where it had become commonplace and normal for people to throw their trash on the ground, and there were people who were expected as part of their working duties to pick up this trash and put it in a wastebin. It wouldn’t really matter whether the worker minded this duty, or whether it was commonly accepted behavior, or whether it was a bit inconvenient to dispose of the trash properly, or whether the person was a bit busy. Some people, probably those raised a certain way, would automatically intuit that there is something wrong with this and throw out their own garbage. They might even pick up one or two pieces others had left behind, too. But who is really being inconvenienced?
When employees are forced to spend time collecting carts prices at the store go up . Customers are the ones being inconvenienced by higher prices when people abandon their carts.
This depends too much. It’s standard at many stores to have someone who goes out and fetches all the carts. They have to do this anyway because of the cart corrals. This sounds like some idea by a European in some tiny parking lot without those.
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.
For an idea about society, that is an incredibly isolated lens on the problem.
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.
There is a third position I've come across, which is also used to justify littering. It's the "they hire people to do this so I don't have to". Sometimes combined with "if I returned my cart/didn't litter those people wouldn't have a job".
It sounds like a good test in theory but I would say it's actually more nuanced than that.
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.
I've worked retail jobs where employees were assigned lot duty on a rotating basis, and I can assure you most people didn't want to do it and staff had to be vigilant to make sure it wasn't being neglected. It's moderately hard physical labor (assuming there are no powered cart-pusher things and the lot is large and on some kind of slope), and is out in the elements where it can be frigidly cold and windy or swelteringly hot. Some employees might be misanthropic enough in context that they'd rather do it than work inside, but it's definitely not all or even a majority in my experience.
It seems to be different in the USA, but here they wouldn't. If somebody would abandon a shopping cart, it would stay there indefinitely until somebody returns it. I mean the employee might do it after work, on there way home, but also only for the same reason any other random person would do it.
The employees arent there to have fun. When customers create work for the store they need to spend more on wages and prices go up. The shopping cart theory isnt about the employees, its about making the whole system a little bit worse for everyone else.
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.
>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.
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.
You forgot to add: "A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it."
Is this a US phenomenon? Here in Germany, people always return their shopping carts. Yes, the carts take a coin as a deposit, which can be removed when the cart is returned, but many people have shopping cart openers (for want of a better word) on their keyrings, that circumvent the deposit, yet I haven't EVER seen anyone leaving their shopping cart. I'd go so far as to say that'd be even less socially adequate than urinating in public.
I've been around Europe a fair bit and from Bulgaria to Portugal, people just return their carts. It's a no-brainer.
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.
I'm trying to think back to the last time I saw a shopping cart in a movie. I think it was probably Terms of Endearment, but I don't think that the cart made it outside.
Greetings from Finland. No deposit required for the carts, yet almost all carts are being returned (I can't remember when I last saw one not returned).
Wherever you are in Finland is more considerate than wherever I am in in Finland. Often when I arrive at my local Prisma there’s an employee outside wrangling abandoned carts.
Recently in NL many supermarkets have dropped the coin completely. But people have been conditioned for years to return the cart. Though there are cart thieves.
In the UK some places have it, some do not. Lidl does need the coin, Waitrose does not but has a system that stops you taking them out beyond the car park (there are warnings on, other supermarkets do not.
Almost everyone returns them in all the supermarkets in my area.
My elderly mom never shops at Aldi (in the US) because she can't figure out the coin thing. Given that she spends outrageous amounts on groceries, Aldi is losing a ton of money by paywalling the stupid cart.
Aldi is the only place in the US that I know of that uses this system. It works well enough, no carts in the lot, and surprisingly people sometimes leave a quarter in the cart as a sort of “pay it forward” minor charity. (Good because not everyone keeps change these days.)
The only downside of this in the US is that homeless people will tend to hang around Aldi's asking people if they can return their cart to get the coin. Most of them are friendly and thankful but every once in awhile an aggressive person would make me very uncomfortable.
I also expect Aldi management isn't thrilled about homeless people camping outside their stores.
I can't say for the US, but over here the coin system is ubiquitous, and if you've not got a coin you can ask at the service desk and they'll hand you a branded coin to use.
In my part of Germany (BW) I also almost never see carts outside of roughtly where they should be. Sometimes they are just lazily pushed under the enclosure (if you want to call it that), but most of the times they are just how they should be.
Took this picture close to the place where I’m living, people just come home with the cart and then drop it outside. This is Germany https://ibb.co/rGXfb0PY
PS: This is not meant as snark, but rather an observation, that by means of a small nudge (in this case the coin deposit), people can learn to do the Right Thing. To quote Charlie Munger:
> Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
I am old enough to have lived in Germany when they were not coin operated, and most carts were returned at that time as well.
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).
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.)
I don’t go to Aldi because of the coin thing in the shopping carts. I went there once, didn’t have at change, and had to carry everything until my arms got full, then just left. I’m not going to carry change with me all the time on the off chance I decide to go to Aldi. Every other store lets me take a cart for free, and I return it because it’s the right thing to do and I want them to remain free.
They are still free, since it is a deposit, not a fee. Also don't you need to put in a coin, when you use a locker, in a museum or the library, or the train station? This is ubiquitous here. You don't need to use a real coin, they are also fake plastic coins for only this purpose, you can get everywhere, and also tools, which you put in to unlock, and then can immediately pull out again.
I get that it’s a deposit, but it still means I have to carry a coin, or some kind of slug. It’s one more thing to carry or think about, that other places don’t require.
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.
Why do the stores have the coin deposit if leaving the shopping cart, even if you circumvented the deposit, is morally more morally reprehensible than urinating in public?
> Is this a US phenomenon
Yeah, you can kind of do whatever you want here. It's sort of our thing
For the uninitiated, what's the subtext here? Is this about a trend in behavior of teens in Germany?
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.
Yes, it's unfortunately a trend to throw e-scooters into rivers. Unfortunately the government is still not collecting stats about this vandalism. Throwing e-scooters with batteries into rivers is dangerous, because the batteries contain poisonous metals. Unfortunately many people appreciate it when people throw these scooters into the river, because they are "annoyed be them when they are standing in their way on the sidewalk".
Haha I was wondering if this part was unclear but assumed it was obvious from context, that the cart opener can be removed from the coin slit. Imagine leaving your keyring on your cart... yikes!
> Imagine leaving your keyring on your cart... yikes!
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.
The reason my wife (I have coins) uses them is that it's just easier to access. No need to go through your coins (if you have any), you just put it in.
$5 sez you have some data that just so happens to confirm your biases, and i bet there's also some data that says masking actually did help. Utterly pointless arguing this nonsense, in the end it always just turns out to be speed-runs to some tedious conspiracy theories.
Yes, and it generally isn’t because of laws, there’s just a lot of sensible social customs (don’t walk while eating on the street because it encourages litter, etc) and others will remind you of those customs if you break them. And unlike the US, if you break those unwritten rules and then start a fight for “content” when confronted (assault is illegal), police will actually put you in jail or deport you instead of looking the other way.
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.
For the purposes of this specific conversation, the layout of typical Japanese supermarkets, the cost of groceries and the frequent lack of specialized parking for supermarkets, Japan is probably an irrelevant comparison. Where there are parking lots, people typically purchase only what could be carried back to their car without carts. Bicycles are used for shopping with much greater frequency than countries like the U.S. Shopping carts are typically taken and returned at the entrance of the store before the customer exits. At Uwajimaya in the United States (a Japanese asian market with stores in Oregon and Washington), remarkably, the same cultural use of shopping carts occurs.
Most people in Japan live outside of the Yamanote circle in Tokyo. Rural and Suburban supermarkets have parking lots (although in central areas they can still be quite small) and people still use cars for shopping trips, especially in the countryside.
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.
I lived well outside of Tokyo and most supermarkets were eki-mae (near train stations) and did not have parking lots. I did go to markets by car, and the practice I mentioned, shopping carts used exclusively within the store, was practiced. There very well may be exceptions, but as I noted, the cultural practice even extends to Japanese markets in the United States.
This has much to do with the history of Japan and its inhabitants vs the history of the US and the type of people who moved here and occupied / colonized it (don't use "settled", there was no settling, only stealing). The US was largely built on individualism, high risk-high reward, lawlessness, aggression, and a lack of social cohesiveness (don't like it somewhere? there's plenty of other places to go and be on your own). Japan on the other hand, while it had wars/violence too, that happened within a highly structured society built on a form of feudalism.
Yeah it's the small things, friend of mine was in Japan recently and first thing he noticed is that everyone wears backpacks in front of them while riding the train as to not bother others. There are also signs for that (in fact Japan has A LOT of signs for foreigners on what to do).
It's a rare example of a working high-trust society.
Japan also measures the waistline of everyone over 40 and fines their coworkers if they are too fat. Difficult to find a balance with the shame culture. US clearly not enough Japan too much.
They don't fine workers, they fine companies and only after a certain threshold which is rarely enforced. And encouraging not being fat is not a bad thing and shouldn't be controversial, it's healthier overall.
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.
I keep seeing the argument that non-returners are creating jobs. Does that mean they also throw their trash on the streets so cleaners have to be hired? Should one randomly break into houses so every people need to hire security guards? How about scratching cars on the street so mechanics and painters have some extra work?
I can understand the argument insofar as it's necessary for the business to want it clean, so the result is not a tragedy of the commons.
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.
I also don't want a risk of my car being dented. So there's some tragedy there if it was truly rampant.
>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.
> So I approached the question of shopping cart abandonment the way I would any puzzle about human behavior: I collected data. My evidence came from an unlikely source: Cart Narcs, a small group whose mission is to encourage cart return, sometimes gently, sometimes less so.
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!)
I think you're misreading the situation in (2). There is still a social contract to return the carts - just because you put a coin them doesn't make that go away.
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.
No, it may be intended as a fine of sorts, but the explicit number turns it into a cost that people are willing to pay.
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.
> wouldn't the shop need to have someone there to return all the unreturned carts?
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.
It's a similar phenomenon to day cares dealing with late pickups. They have a few chronically late parents, so they institute a late pickup fee. Parents who always picked their kids up on time because of the implicit agreement now have an explicit agreement that it's okay to pick them up late if they pay a bit more. So the incidences of late pickups actually increased at the day care. You're exchanging a trust based system for financial interactions and some people have very different motivations.
It's not an uncommon reaction. There's lots of things that people are on average perfectly willing to do for free but are not willing to do for a pittance sum.
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.
Popup blood donation sites are pretty common in the US, too, though run by orgs like the Red Cross. I've done it a few times, there's no payment involved besides some free snacks + drinks.
The mindset makes sense if you see his as an implicit service. The equivalent is if there was a dedicated cart collector every 2-3 spaces and you pay them $1 to return your cart. Now you're paying for a service.
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.
I always wondered if there are people who don't have a clear distinction between their private space/home and public space. Whether it's not putting their carts back, or talking loudly on the phone/playing music in a gym or any public space, tossing trash our of car windows, there are some people who seem to inhabit their own inner world so fully that it doesn't register that there are other people around them and that they are using a shared resource.
> Promoting cart return might be as simple as setting a new norm
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?
> 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?
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.
> 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.
Interesting! I've seen this happen a few times, though I've never witnessed something as extreme as a 10+ minute wait just for the off-ramp. I still maintain that it seems dangerous regardless of the situation, because while someone stops and tries to cut in line, the non-off-ramp lane they're stopped on can still keep moving, creating opportunities for collisions.
It's more common in larger metro areas - NYC, LA and Atlanta are infamous for it - but can happen anywhere depending on what is going on further down the exit lane (an emergency vehicle, car breakdown, etc).
Chicago's Lake Shore Drive/Belmont intersection has 3 stoplights you have to pass to get out. During rush hour it sometimes gets so backed up my bus has gotten stuck in it for a half hour. The first light is for the northbound on/off and a small side street that goes to some tennis/etc courts, the second for southbound on/off, and the side street adjacent to LSD splits in two so the third light is for the same street as the second light and is where you can finally enter it.
I think the issue is that the long-term decline in social trust—and the accompanying rise in surveillance, authoritarian enforcement, and costs/prices—happens too slowly for people to notice and associate with their own actions. If every time they left a cart out there was a new camera or scowling security officer on their next visit, they might notice and change their behavior. But as it is, they don’t notice their own contribution to the consequences that they so often complain about.
(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.)
>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?
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.
A zipper merge is only applicable to a lane that is ending or has an obligation to merge. In exit lane jumping, the car is coming from a lane that does not end and has no obligation to merge. In fact, at their point of entry, you will notice a solid white separating the two lanes, indicating you cannot even legally merge.
There's a difference between zipper merging on a lane closure (which is what the article described) and what the person you are responding to described.
You are not supposed to block your lane of traffic because you didn't want to wait like everyone else.
No moral hazard, but there is a hazard to not brushing your teeth: cavities, and more explicitly, the financial cost of having cavities repaired. Even the best dental insurance plans in America are capped at $1500 - $3000 of benefits a year, usually less than a single root canal or crown.
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:
One explanation I've heard that resonates with me is that we subconsciously feel as if we're playing a more complex and less obvious version of the prisoner's dilemma.
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.
why is returning the cart intrinsically some sign of “goodness” but returning your plates to the kitchen and washing them at a restaurant is not? The customer is at the store to fulfill their needs, not the store’s. Taking the groceries from the checkout to the car in a cart helps fulfill the customer’s aims. Returning the cart does not, same as picking up trash in the store car park does not. And the revenue from customers pays for return of the carts from the parking lot, so most customers feel that is a better deal than a place that forces them to return the carts.
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?
> 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.
That's because the business is trying to save on their own manpower costs by shifting some of the burden to their customers -- much like self-checkout.
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).
By that logic, why not also just throw your trash on the ground? And, if you need to use the restroom while you're there, why not just pee on the floor?
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.
Because the cart doesn’t belong in the road or parking lot the same way your plate doesn’t belong upturned on the floor of the restaurant. I’m not sure about you but I will even stack my plates and dishes and silverware so the bus boy can grab it all in one go. Maybe that makes me some sort of a holy man.
BTW, a lot of bussers prefer you not do that. They have their own system for stacking things in their trays, and they have to un-stack your things to do it their way. Like, they generally can’t pick up your whole tidy stack, set it in their tub, and walk away like that.
My acquaintances in food service tell me they appreciate the thought, but rather you not go through the effort.
I've found an anecdotal correlation that the (relatively few) people that have moralized at me about returning shopping carts also tend to dislike self-checkout at the same stores. I guess it is immoral to have someone return your cart, but moral to have someone scan your groceries? I generally don't return my cart, but I mostly self-checkout. I'm pure evil apparently.
Full-service checkout is a service that is explicitly offered by (most) stores, and yes, it's a service many people like -- in part because of the poor UX of the self-checkout machines. ("Please return item to the bagging area.")
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.
> where are people expected to learn these implicit rules?
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.
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 was going to comment this exact thing about stacking plates. I think most servers/ex-servers also do this regardless of age. It's even easier to do than returning a shopping cart.
Parallel but unrelated, you can play these tones [0] to unlock shopping cart wheels that have locked up on you. The literal only times I ever abandon a cart (not return it to the store or cart corral) is when they lock up and I can't move the god damned things -- and the rare times it has happened have been in the middle of aisles where cars are supposed to drive, FULLY LOADED CART, before I ever get to the car to unload.
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.
It’s all relative to your locale. When I lived in the city it was a scourge no matter the time of day, didn’t matter which part of town I would go to, some entitled persons would leave their shopping carts in random parking spaces, or in the plant beds, grass medians, etc. with an empty cart return rack mere steps away.
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.
I'm confused. Are you saying that this is a unique problem to the US and that France used to have a different unique problem, that is, in my estimation, worse? And that it was solved by requiring deposits on the carts.
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?
There is a difference between leaving the cart in a random parking lot and not returning it and to decide to just take it (stealing). The latter is a deliberate action, that involves more work, not less.
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
I suspect that the reason is: "I don't want to do that, and if I don't do it then somebody else eventually will, and if they don't eventually do it then that's their problem, and in any case I don't care."
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.
I think here the business would rather employ workers to yell at costumers, to return their carts, rather than start to collect them. Well, rather it does not need to employ them, they would do it own their own, but only until after the other costumers failed to yell at these people.
I never return my carts. I used to bag groceries in a grocery store and whenever I got sick of customers and/or coworkers I'd go get the carts. The more carts far out in the parking lot the better, I could an entire shift without being inside talking to customers.
My dad never returns carts. He also worked at a grocery store when he was young and had the same mentality as this. He also said that he is "creating work" for these young kids and it's good for them ha.
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.
I liked getting carts too, but I return mine, because no one else I worked with liked doing it. I’m not going to force someone to do work they might not want to do. I don’t know them, and statistically (from my n of probably 50), most people don’t want to do it… especially in the winter.
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.
I question this assertion. What 'out of the way' exists in the parking lots you frequent? Every one that I can think of offhand consists of parking spaces, areas for people to walk from their cars, driving lanes and little else. Anywhere you could leave it other than the designated place is causing a problem for someone.
I'm now completely torn! I always return carts just out of habit as a nice thing to do, but I totally see this as a legitimate reason not to return them! I never worked at a grocery, but I have worked at other jobs where there was that one task that got you out of sight of management so you could take your time and mentally relax for a while. Taking the trash to the dumpster way out back, restocking the walk-in fridge from the basement, etc. It was less about not working, as it was about the freedom.
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!
You're onto something. It's an almost perfect autistic/introvert "slap on some headphones and do something to feel productive without having to engage with humans" task.
But most people hate it, so my wife and I try to show consideration.
I return carts, but I too worked at a grocery store and so did a fair amount of cart wrangling, a lot of it during the Phoenix summer. It was very zen, watching the monsoons build. Certainly didn't mind it.
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.
>I don't see why collecting your cart can't be part of that.
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 .
You have to be out there getting them from the corral anyway. There's no people dedicated to collecting carts, it's just a periodic task.
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.
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.)
>There's no people dedicated to collecting carts, it's just a periodic task.
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.
Ok, but why does not putting a cart in a coral equate to a broken window, but not facing product does not? As the person collecting carts it took me less time to collect 10 "free range" carts than it would have taken those 10 people to return those carts.
>why does not putting a cart in a coral equate to a broken window, but not facing product does not?
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
Ok, so is your primary issue that people don't take the cart all the way to the coral or that they leave them in places that cause problems for people? Because that's two different things.
> And one woman, upon being confronted about leaving her cart, declared, “I have really bad vertigo,” before getting behind the wheel and driving away. To be clear: Disabilities deserve accommodation. But if you could push the full cart to your car, why couldn’t you return the empty one?
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.
idk about vertigo specifically (and things laypeople diagnose as vertigo), but yes in that I had a family member who was exactly in this situation. Walking sticks and still very concerned with falling while getting to a cart, then perfectly stable after being able to grab onto something in front of them. Though I highly doubt they themselves left carts around the lot rather than returning them to the closest corral.
Driving? Plenty of people have personal mobility issues while driving just fine once they're in a car. Have you ever given away used home health aid items on craigslist? It can be a pretty sad scene.
Sorry, I had misread the comment I was responding to. I had already covered what it was actually asking in my original comment - parking near a cart someone else abandoned, or failing that making her way to the closest one despite difficulty.
Sometimes my cart gets accidentally out of bounds (because I parked too close to the grocer store's property line) and the wheels lock up. Then I try to drag it somewhere out of the way at least.
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.
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).
Ya, no, thats not very feasible. The child is perfectly capable of surviving for the 30 seconds to one minute needed. The question was about law, not pragmatics, anyways, since those are the times we live in.
I already wrote something else in here, but one other thought I had afterwards was related to IKEA carts -- they have four 360-degree casters, which makes them extra prone to just flying in literally any direction with a bit of wind if they're not returned to the corrals. Strangely enough, I rarely ever encounter an abandoned cart there, or full corrals; they're almost always empty! Curious if IKEA policy is far more rigorous than a grocery store on cart retrieval and return.
Last time I went to IKEA I couldn’t physically get the cart beyond the loading area. There were barricades setup that seemed sized specifically to stop carts from leaving the area.
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.
Many people only use the carts to the loading area which has a well-patrolled corral next to it (any employee tasked with helping you load returns to the building with some or all of the carts).
The 360x4 casters are pretty insane the first time you realize it.
Are we talking about bringing your cart all the way back to the store entrance, or about placing your cart in one of the cart corrals located out in the parking lot? At a large store in the US, the latter are typically provided, and they are nearly always near at hand (maybe 5 spaces away). It's not a far walk.
The vast majority do return carts in my country. But when you have 100 customers an hour (which isn't much) and 5% don't return carts that is 5 carts per hour - odds are you will always see a couple carts out of place. The numbers above are made up of course, but the point remains that a small minority makes everyone look bad.
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.
And what country is that? If you're comfortable sharing.
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.
On the other hand, I have a friend who worked in retail as a teenager tell me that employees sometimes appreciate carts getting left out, as it means they get to go for a nice leisurely walk outside, away from the toxic work atmosphere, to go round them up. So while carts getting left out may be positive for other shoppers, it might be doing a disservice to overworked employees.
I don't even think about it. If available, I take it from near where I park and I return it to the front of the store with the rest of the carts. The little tiny bit of extra exercise is nice to clear my head before I start driving.
The shopping centre where I shop frequently (Europe) has a large outdoor parking space and every 20 meters or so there's a little kiosk where you can return the cart. People do because it's actually easier to return it than to worry about crashing into it when you're getting out of the parking spot. From time to time an employee goes out and collects all the carts from kiosks and gets them back to the shop. I don't know if it's the same way in the US, maybe some people don't return it simply because they parked too far from the entrance.
Not so much a kiosk, but American grocery stores often have one parking spot every other row that is blocked off with a fence/barrier and marked as a cart return storage. But that has its own problems because if someone hastily shoves a cart in there instead of stacking them in line it takes up too much space and creates a dangerous extrusion into the adjacent spots.
> And one woman, upon being confronted about leaving her cart, declared, “I have really bad vertigo,” before getting behind the wheel and driving away. To be clear: Disabilities deserve accommodation. But if you could push the full cart to your car, why couldn’t you return the empty one?
Because you need the stability of the cart (as a walker aid) itself.
Independent thought and personal accountability are sadly lacking in the US. "I see a bunch of unreturned carts. I must follow and fit it. See im justified in not returning it." :-(
This is closer to a variant of the broken window theory than something that's US-specific. Where I am, people who don't return carts are clearly in the minority, so they probably choose to do it because they think it benefits them greatly.
About once or twice per year, I might leave my cart outside a corral if there's none nearby and I'm sick or in a terrible hurry. (In no cases do I leave it somewhere where it could roll and strike a car)
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.
Parked overnight at a midwest Walmart (when that was a thing) and got out to do something at 4am trying not to look like a predator. Ten carts were pushed over the embankment into the creek. Lifted them out and put them where they could be hosed off. What gets into people?
I always return my cart to a collection kiosk thing out in the parking lot, or to where the carts are lined up at the store entrance if that's closer.
I don't recall when this became a thing, though. Back in the early-mid 1980s as a teenager my first job involved going out into the lot at K-Mart and bringing in all the carts.
Surprised that safety wasn't a statistically significant reason. Pushing your cart to a return exposes one to more parking lot traffic as a vulnerable pedestrian -- particularly worrisome for the elderly. It minimizes risk to leave the cart near your vehicle. Perhaps I have a really solid rationalization at work here :D
> Pushing your cart to a return exposes one to more parking lot traffic as a vulnerable pedestrian
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.
Wouldn't make too much sense because cart kiosks are typically no more than 4-5 parking spaces over. The marginal risk compared to getting to your care are basically nil.
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.
When on an extended trip to Delray Beach, Florida and shopping at the Publix market I tried to walk in with a cart that was lurking in a parking space.
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 once got yelled at by a Safeway employee because I didn't respond to her "have a nice day, sir"
"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)
I didn't see a mention of "they resent being gouged for essentials by oligopolies, and so signal defiance by not returning the cart". But it's real, especially as the cost of living rises faster than inflation.
Since there are rarely compact carts available at the entrance of my local store, I often bring a cart in when I park initially. While more self-serving, where one decides to participate in the shopping cart social contract is of interest as well.
Internet behavioral science with terrible selection bias round 2: classify whether someone will comment here that they don’t put their carts back based on their previous comments. Then, interpret the classifier to see what makes them tick
I watched many Cart Narcs episodes. Always the same, the people look uneducated in every single one of them, mostly "Karen" types. It is about respecting society, and these people don't. In the EU, they respect and care about their society. It is all cultural.
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".
To the contrary, almost all paid airport carts offer a reward for return, but you can always find them abandoned amongst the parking
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.
Or spending 3-4 minutes to return the cart will cost them the same amount of parking fees. Just a thought. I think carts are more complicated than they seem.
Worse is people who just leave their empty basket behind at the self-checkout till. This isn't sticking it up to the supermarket, this is really just an F U to the next customer...
For me it depends on the store. A normal grocery store: I will always return the cart. A luxury store: I don't, I consider it part of the service that I'm paying more for.
A real luxury store will push your cart out to your car for you and then bring it back.
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)
Well, AI would take a long time to properly corral all shopping carts back to the store. Much easier to have it product slop and replace passionate underpaid creators.
This is a little amusing to me because at a supermarket I cycle to there's a bit of a general understanding that there should be a stash of carts near the bike stands, so I can usually arrive, pick up one from there, then leave it there for the next person, and save everyone some time.
Well, duh. The least you can do is wheel it into the nearby cart corral, where the store employee will shepherd them all back in with a CartManager XD (whose name is extra hilarious to me). If you know anybody who's worked in retail you understand the suckage of drawing the short straw of having to round up all the carts, especially in inclement weather.
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.
> a CartManager XD (whose name is extra hilarious to 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...
What I find fascinating is the mental gymnastics people go through to justify not returning their shopping cart. It's not enough to simply be quietly selfish. Peoplw want affirmation for their actions. Often you don't need to return it to the store. There are return bays scattered all ove rthe car park. The goal is fairly simple: carts can cause accidents, damage vehicles or simply block parking spots.
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.
America fails the shopping cart test and it really reflects on how we treat the rest of our culture. I dont know if the chicken came before the egg, but the behavior shows nonetheless.
People can push the full cart 2 miles all around inside Costco but not an extra 30 feet to return an empty cart to a cart corral? There's no reason for it. It's one of the best indicators of narcissistic individuals - the other is treating restaurant servers poorly.
You mention Costco as an example and claim that the return is (on average?) 30 feet away from your vehicle? Did you mean meters? Either way quite an underestimation. At our local meglo market (owned by Kroger) there isn't a return for every parking aisle. The distance and exposure to traffic to use a return is quite variable and can be significant. My local store is large enough that they have a cart returner as a dedicated position.
If laws were loosened up and littering was no longer punishable, would you begin littering? Is hypothetical legal recourse the main thing that would motivate you not to act in a certain way?
“But you see, restaurant servers understand that a certain percentage of customers will treat them poorly, and yet they choose to work the job anyway. In effect, it is priced in to their wage. In fact, by treating them even worse, I may actually make their wage go up by increasing the wage demanded!” —some HN commenter, probably
Seems early posters are blaming the customers, but at least in Canada the grocery stores treat their customers with so much disdain that i see no problem with people leaving their cart wherever, if it can make more trouble for loblaws et al. Framing helping out a hostile oligopoly as “doing the right thing” is nonsense.
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.
If you want to cause trouble for Loblaws, don't shop at Loblaws and other chains of theirs. Willingly giving them your money, and then performatively "retaliating" by making the life of the minimum-wage employee (who would be here either way) slightly harder is completely useless as a form of protest. This feels like a rationalization for not taking the cart back by trying to hand-wave it to some large systematic actors. But the whole point is that the shopping cart choice is always a hyper-local choice. It's only about you, other customers and the people working at the store, not some distant megacorporation.
I'm returning my cart not because of my support of grocery stores but because I care about other customers: abandoned carts getting in the way of walking/parking, may damage cars and just in general clutter the space
Honestly, the thing that bothers me the most about the article is that I learned there are people who not only go around telling people they didn't return their cart, but that they film the people as they do so. That type of online vigilante/public shaming is bad, IMHO. And then the public voyerism of everyone watching it and maybe commenting on it. Such strange human behavior. I can see why many people would respond with "who the fuck are you to be filming me".
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?
I'm a parent with a child with profound autism. You leave your kid in the car for the 30 seconds it takes to return the cart. It's never been an issue and the kiddo is perfectly content waiting for a short period while I walk the cart back.
My god, people act like there's kidnappers at every grocery store just waiting for this one moment to abduct a child.
I looks more this is about managing fears and worries. This is also close to helicopter parenting, i.e. parents who are "overattentive and overly fearful for their child, particularly outside the home".
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.
>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.
It's not hard. Lock the car and return the cart. Your kid(s) will be fine unattended in the car for 20 seconds crying or not. If this really distresses you, park in the back by a cart corral.
Menards does have huge cart corrals. The corrals have never been empty enough for me to confuse it for a parking spot, but without carts it would fit a car just fine. It's odd that they don't have dividers. Then again Costco doesn't either.
I had to check the Menards website. I knew Menards sold everything but it never dawned on me that they literally sell those carports. I didn't know that's what those structures were called either. That's a good point about the large lumber carts.
I usually just leave them in the cart and we go and return it together. Or now as they became older - they push it themselves to the corrals (with me next to them of course).
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.
I already checked out my own groceries. I'll just leave it in the parking lot for someone who works at the store to retrieve it.
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.
I have gone ice skating a lot in the past. Many people rent the skates from the establishment. I don't think I have ever seen anyone, after skating, just leave their rented shoes by the lockers/benches when the switch back to their own shoes. They always return the rented shoes to the desk, even when there is a short lineup at rush hour.
It's very strange that people think the same courtesy should not be extended to shopping carts.
If I go to a fast food restaurant, where you order and collect at the counter, and where I don't see the staff cleaning the tables between customers, I do wipe down my table with the provided napkins.
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.
We do that in Sweden if the kids made a mess. Same in Denmark, Norway, Finland, Netherlands and I'd assume Japan and Korea as well.
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.
>What if you had to clean your own table at Applebees?
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.
No the problem is people who leave them in thr parking.
Unless you return it you’re making everyone else pay for returning _your_ cart. Plus of course making the parking harder to use in the meantime.
You could say you create a paid job by not returning your cart. The downsides I see is that free wheeling carts can cause accidents (eg during wind) and create annoyances such as blocking parking spaces. We could probably find some more arguments on both sides. Personally, I consider the downsides to outweigh the pros, which is why I consider it to be the right thing to return it.
On the other hand, it can be convenient to grab a loose cart that's near your parking space, instead of having to un-jam a cart from the 50 that are stacked inside each other at the front of the store.
The relevant element to me is less the rational construct behind my actions but what the social contract and environment expects of me. I can violate those rules but then have to live with the consequences. In cases such as this I prefer peace over conflict. It’s a small price to pay for me to return the cart and what I gain is not to cause unhappiness in those around me and thus in myself. This is reason enough for me to do it. In other cases, I might want to demonstrate that I do not agree, but I try to be conscious in what fights I want to invest my energy in.
I assume it's generally unbecoming to reference 4chan posts for an academic but surprised the Shopping Cart theory didn't get a mention given how close it was to the subject matter.
>“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.”
My completely unqualified opinion is that this kind of behaviour is linked directly to intellectual ability. Returning the cart requires self-discipline but also implies a thought process around upholding and creating social order. Even fear of shame implies a desire to uphold social standing with others.
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.
I strongly doubt it is related to intellectual ability but cultural expectations.
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.
> I strongly doubt it is related to intellectual ability but cultural expectations.
The IQ of a crowd isn't the same as the IQ of the people in it, but it is related.
What do you mean by this?
The IQ of an individual in a crowd is materially different than the average IQ of the entire crowd.
How is the average IQ of an entire crowd relevant to parking violations of UN diplomats with diplomatic immunity?
> 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.
Here's an account at https://notalwaysright.com/the-dunkin-duchess/396274/ :
> 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?
Wow. Can you give some more geographical context on where this happened and where the girl is from? (Obviously, not revealing personal details)
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 link says it took place in the US.
There's a minority of people wealthy enough to grease everything with money or really powerful connections. In a conversation involving people doing their own shopping and eating at places where you are presumed to take your tray to the bin I wasn't even thinking about them.
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.
One of today's entries from that site is "Wario Kart", at https://notalwaysright.com/wario-kart/398386/
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.
I fully acknowledge their existence. I'm sure I most certainly engage into equivalent antisocial behavior in some way or another wherever I most lack awareness, and my sole point is that, for most of us, when we are doing that, we dumb.
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.
I don't really think you understand my point. It isn't simple antisocial behavior. It's a multi-generational learned belief in a hierarchical class structure which will persist so long as enough people reject equality and solidarity, and instead actively protect their class privilege. (In modern parlance, "anti-woke" is roughly the opposite of "check your privilege").
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.
A lot of it has to be education too, for exemple in some cultures the outside, ie outside your own place, is seen as more or less a giant trash, so people see no problem dumping their shit even right in front of their own building. In my culture the outside is seen as a common shared place and definitely not a trash, I remember my grandpa telling me not to spit on the ground or to pick up my candy wrappers when I was maybe 4 or 5 years old.
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
To me that blows my mind, not because of viewing the outside as trash, but being content with living in trash. To me the observation, that the outside is a giant trash, would give me a desire to order it.
I have heard this opinion echoed by Indians, the combination of both the outside not being their problem, and thinking someone else (lower caste) will take care of it.
There are city workers and occasionally homeless people who pickup trash (to salvage or sell). I'm not sure how this opinion of theirs is formed but I can assure you nobody is throwing around trash with anything remotely caste related in their mind. It isn't even in consideration.
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.
Most stimuli result in habituation over time. Live with trash long enough and you’ll stop noticing it so much.
what if your efforts are futile due to sheer amount of other people producing trash?
it is not so simple of a problem with clear cut solution.
I'm talking about people spitting in front of the elevator doors, people opening their mail in the common building area and immediately throwing the envelope on the floor, people finishing their drink in front of the building and discarding the bottle by the side of the entrance door
We don't need alien tech to solve these, it's 100% an education issue.
They should be educated, sure, but this can't be an education issue. Rather an issue of crappy upbringing and low intellect or, when it's a cultural thing, crappy culture.
This depends if you only understand learning in school to be education, or if you mean the whole education that a pupil underwent, which I think was the case here. To me upbringing is another word for education.
Then I would use the legal and executive system, to deal with this people. That's why they exist after all.
That makes sense, but sometimes it's even more confusing than that!
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
I tend to reduce this even further: you as a person are either fundamentally capable of considering (and caring about) how your actions affect others, or you aren't.
You can draw a pretty clear line across about half of america with this standard. It's depressing.
I reduce this even further,
You're an animal, or your not. We shouldn't give animals human rights.
>like an animal with no higher order thinking.
In Germany I see far fewer abandoned shopping carts than in America.
I live by this. It is one of the least controversial 4chan takes.
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.
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.
I try to grab an outside shopping cart to leave the world slightly less chaotic than when I entered; which is all we can do in life, perhaps.
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 try to grab an outside shopping cart to leave the world slightly less chaotic than when I entered; which is all we can do in life, perhaps
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.
> bypassing a long queue of cars only to merge into the lane at the last possible second,
If everyone did this the jams would flow faster, according to WSDOT.
This is true, but with a few caveats:
* 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.
From what I can see, it's not about higher throughput (which stays the same)
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.
If there is a right turn only lane, and a straight lane, and the right turn only lane is backed up with people queuing, you are not making traffic go faster by merging in at the last second. You are slowing down a bunch of people trying to turn, and blocking the people trying to go straight.
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.
You should not do jams with opposite direction lanes. I assume op talked about that.
[dead]
> so why should I be the sucker who does it?
Because it's the right thing to do.
Yeah, as someone living in Germany, returning shopping carts sounds like a non-issue. The only case where people don't return shopping carts are homeless people, who use it to store there personal belongings. So it's deliberate and they do not litter the world with shopping carts, but actively use them.
> I stopped even though I agree it is the right thing to do because I felt like a fool every time I did it... why should I be the sucker who does it?
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.
So, I see 2-5 carts in the lot, and a few hundred people in the store.
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)
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
While again not doubting that US is worse than many other countries, I wonder if some amount of this is due to our uh, organically sprawling road system. Because I have definitely been one of the people doing this at times, but it was always due to quite honestly misunderstanding what lane I needed to be in.Anecdotally I've heard that our drivers are nowhere near the worst, but I don't have firsthand experience.
Does it have anything to do with US parking lots being huge? I usually ship at Lidl, so the parking lot can hold maybe 50 cars. It takes 1 minute to return the cart, and there's usually a car parked next to me, so there isn't actually space to leave it (unless I'm an asshole and leave it in front of another car).
When there are large parking lots, there are multiple cart return areas scattered throughout the lot. Otherwise things would be really inefficient, to an even more nightmarish (and money-costing) degree.
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.
America is very big and diverse, and local culture varies wildly. You can go to a Whole Foods store in one part of a city and almost everyone returns their carts there, and then you can go to a Walmart in another part of the city and it looks like something out of a zombie movie, with carts and trash littering the parking lot.
> Do you ever grab one of those "stranded" shopping carts on the way in to the store?
Of course. They're typically more convenient than the carts that have been properly returned.
They taught this to us in the Scouts- "always leave your campsite cleaner than you found it".
>Do you ever grab one of those "stranded" shopping carts on the way in to the store?
Nope.
..but that's because I have my own cart I bring to the store.
It's derived from the "how do you treat the waiter" test in first dates, so it's not like this came from nowhere. Your small actions where "it doesn't matter" can have surprising revelations on your overall disposition in life. e.g., if you're reaction to being asked about a shopping cart is violence, that says a lot about how you treat many confrontations in your life.
I think they test distinct things.
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.
> leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly.
Found a cart leaver. :)
You stole their username :D
Gotta get ahead of the game !
> it is more likely to cause them to spit in your food than it is to get you better service.
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?
>What? It is hardly any extra work, you also have walked the same way when taking the cart.
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.
This whole category of decision making basically consists of taking observable things and then using them to infer other things despite the correlations often only being barely better than a coin toss. It's the same logic by which the police harass you more if you check more bad demographic checkboxes.
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.
I worked at a grocery store for a while in my teens and early twenties. It is really a surprise to me that this has become an internet topic and even more surprising how strongly people feel like it is a litmus test for good vs bad. I just do not think it is a good litmus test. People are busy, some people have kids. Who is really being inconvenienced?
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.
> People are busy, some people have kids
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.
Remember to put lots of dumb stuff in PRs, because it's "someone's job" to peer review your code. ;)
Funny how peoples' attitude toward retail employees probably wouldn't extend to more work being created for them in their work.
There's a pretty fundamental difference between additional low priority but necessary busy work for a salaried employee and one of the better tasks you get to do as a min-wage retail employee.
Back when I worked in retail, my car was dented multiple times from people not putting carts in the designated areas.
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.
Same re: grocery work and liking getting carts as a teen.
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.'
If everyone did it then you'd probably have a dedicated person to fetch the carts doing that basically throughout their shift. The store still needs the carts for more shoppers and with everyone putting them in the grass that process ends up taking longer.
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".
Yeah and if everyone was littering all the time, the city might employ more dustmen. Or they would say screw it, why waste money and time, when the citizens obviously don't want to live in a clean city.
Maybe everyone should just start murdering people that bothered them ;P. That way we'd have less annoying people and more police.
Then it just becomes an informal cart corral.
Ah yes. It's pouring rain, blowing cold wind in your face, kids are screaming and hitting each other, you stubbed your toe into cart and generally just having bad day. What would jesus do?
Is the standard to return the cart or not? Where do you draw the line? What if it’s only raining? How hard does it need to be raining to sacrifice your principles?
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.
It just doesn't matter. It's a cart, not clubbing baby seals.
Only thing that's more insufferable is the keyboard warriors loosing sleep over tiny things like that.
I've had bad days. I still managed not to be a net negative on my environment. Why can't you? Why can't other people? From my perspective, how you behave when you're having a bad day is the real litmus test. If you're still a decent person then, then you actually have values you care about, that you don't just follow when convenient.
Show me a person and I'll point their flaws.
Theoretically, in this case, the agonizing "It's pouring rain, blowing cold wind in your face, kids are screaming and hitting each other, you stubbed your toe into cart and generally just having bad day" scenario making any man unable to manage the extra-harrowing effort of directing a cart a few meters into a designated space.
He wouldn’t be at the store; or perhaps flipping tables.
He got two fishes and five loaves delivered in a clear door dash advertisement.
I feel like the recent and strange habit of people telling me, unprompted, all about their assorted minor medical maladies, syndromes, and treatments -- is a form of "I don't always do the right thing because of these tribulations that I suffer"
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.
Did you think we'd find this string of excuses basically lifted from the article convincing?
He'd tip the cart over so it doesn't blow around in the wind.
I worked at a grocery store as well and we didn’t even have a place to return carts. Even after I got moved up to doing stock, I told the manager I’d be happy to go get carts, especially in the winter when no one else wanted to do it. I thought it was fun to go out there and slide around on them.
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.
I talked to a guy who used to run a grocery store. There were low-income housing apartment buildings nearby. People would walk to the store, buy groceries, and then just roll the damn carts back to their buildings down the street.
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.
As a fellow former grocery store employee, I can agree about the “break up the monotony” concept from the narrow POV of the bored worker.
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
> 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 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 avoid the automated checkouts in part because it takes jobs away from robots. Am I a bad person for creating jobs for humans?
I confess I am a hypocrite though, as I'm one of those job-stealing people that return the cart to the corral.
Murder and incarceration create jobs too. At what point does job creation change from an excuse to an obligation?
Making war, creates an awful lot of jobs in the construction industry!
I am busy. I am a principal engineer on call working 60 hour weeks with an active social life and 2 kids under 4yo...
I always return my cart.
The theory holds and you are making excuses for bad behaviors
Anyone saying they’re too busy to return the cart but not busy enough to use grocery pickup or delivery must have a very calibrated life.
I second this and relate heavily
> People are busy, some people have kids.
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).
kid seats with straps are a thing for a reason, put the rugrat into the seat and then take the cart back.
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.
If you have kids, you let them return the cart, because it is fun for them and already start to move the car out of the parking lot. That way you save even more time.
>Who is really being inconvenienced?
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.
This isn't exclusively about whether it inconveniences employees or not. I was also a grocery store worker and I would also enjoy cart getting in certain weather but I wouldn't want to do it at, for example, walmart. That's practically a contact sport.
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.
I hold a strong but unproven belief that a minority of people who are naturally more conscientious than ordinary are basically holding the world together at the seams.
I have the inverted belief that most people are actually doing all right most of the time, but it's the squeaky wheels that stand out from the crowd and draw my attention all day long. There's just too many man-hours elapsed per day for a true minority to keep it stumbling along as gracefully as it does. We all have our bad days.
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.
Somebody's got to, and I've got a little extra time, so I guess I will.
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.
Only those who return the cart for upright and pure reasons (disorder makes my skin crawl) will escape samsara
Grass might hold the cart in place, but most abandoned carts get dropped off in places where the wind can catch them and blow them into cars.
Fair point.
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.
Walmarts around me seem to have a corral every ten or so cars, hordes of them. I still encounter strays and that’s with them seeming having a dedicated cart cowboy (with his little train).
I once calculated the number of carts Walmart has worldwide and it was mind-boggling.
Are kids really the excuse? I was putting away the cart basically as early as I remember. It was extremely fun to do that as a kid. Ride the cart like a kick scooter then BANG slam it into the rack with the others.
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.
It's extremely sketchy to let your kid return the cart in the parking lot when the average vehicle's hood is at twice their standing height.
Actually glad to hear that. I always wondered if it was pure entitlement and laziness to walk past a loaded corral and then take a car at the entrance.
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.
Imagine, if you will, a society where it had become commonplace and normal for people to throw their trash on the ground, and there were people who were expected as part of their working duties to pick up this trash and put it in a wastebin. It wouldn’t really matter whether the worker minded this duty, or whether it was commonly accepted behavior, or whether it was a bit inconvenient to dispose of the trash properly, or whether the person was a bit busy. Some people, probably those raised a certain way, would automatically intuit that there is something wrong with this and throw out their own garbage. They might even pick up one or two pieces others had left behind, too. But who is really being inconvenienced?
When employees are forced to spend time collecting carts prices at the store go up . Customers are the ones being inconvenienced by higher prices when people abandon their carts.
> One thing I want to point out is that everyone I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts
You must've lived someplace with good weather. I can't imagine it being fun in a snowstorm.
Speaking of memes, you just did one:
> Who is really being inconvenienced?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/smugjak-but-how-does-this-aff...
> some people have kids.
I remember my brothers and I liked doing it because we'd ride on the sides of the cart while putting it away.
This depends too much. It’s standard at many stores to have someone who goes out and fetches all the carts. They have to do this anyway because of the cart corrals. This sounds like some idea by a European in some tiny parking lot without those.
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.
For an idea about society, that is an incredibly isolated lens on the problem.
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.
There is a third position I've come across, which is also used to justify littering. It's the "they hire people to do this so I don't have to". Sometimes combined with "if I returned my cart/didn't litter those people wouldn't have a job".
I'd lump them in with the "bad" members of society group in a heartbeat.
It sounds like a good test in theory but I would say it's actually more nuanced than that.
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.
I've worked retail jobs where employees were assigned lot duty on a rotating basis, and I can assure you most people didn't want to do it and staff had to be vigilant to make sure it wasn't being neglected. It's moderately hard physical labor (assuming there are no powered cart-pusher things and the lot is large and on some kind of slope), and is out in the elements where it can be frigidly cold and windy or swelteringly hot. Some employees might be misanthropic enough in context that they'd rather do it than work inside, but it's definitely not all or even a majority in my experience.
> there are certainly reasons that returning the cart might be difficult or impossible (handicap, small children etc.).
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.
A loaded cart, no less.
>I have been told that they often actually like going outside to get the carts
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.
It seems to be different in the USA, but here they wouldn't. If somebody would abandon a shopping cart, it would stay there indefinitely until somebody returns it. I mean the employee might do it after work, on there way home, but also only for the same reason any other random person would do it.
> if you speak to employees about it, I have been told that they often actually like going outside to get the carts
This has been my experience as well, but people will always blindly insist the opposite just to "win" the shopping cart argument.
The employees arent there to have fun. When customers create work for the store they need to spend more on wages and prices go up. The shopping cart theory isnt about the employees, its about making the whole system a little bit worse for everyone else.
Interesting theory.
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.
>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.
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.
You forgot to add: "A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it."
The worst offender is the kind of person that doesn't put it back specifically because they know about this theory. "Don't tread on me!"
Luckily these sorts tend to be so clownish they keep themselves out of power
There cited reasons for not returning carts is often job creation / security.
Leaving carts means someone must retrieve.
Are people who return shopping carts also predisposed* to be _good drivers_?
* Not considering physical limitations.
[dead]
Is this a US phenomenon? Here in Germany, people always return their shopping carts. Yes, the carts take a coin as a deposit, which can be removed when the cart is returned, but many people have shopping cart openers (for want of a better word) on their keyrings, that circumvent the deposit, yet I haven't EVER seen anyone leaving their shopping cart. I'd go so far as to say that'd be even less socially adequate than urinating in public.
I've been around Europe a fair bit and from Bulgaria to Portugal, people just return their carts. It's a no-brainer.
> Is this a US phenomenon?
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.
someone clever ought to do some kind of statistical analysis and figure out what hidden variables are causing these differences.
> what hidden variables are causing these differences
Just one variable: the Jerk Scale.
what are you hinting towards?
what are you hinting towards?
what are you hinting towards??
It was never said that it was a phenomenon on the whole country.
It is a US phenomenom yes. When it exists in other countries it's because of Hollywood exporting american culture.
Is that really your position? to you ascribe all bad behavior globally to US cultural exports?
not all bad behavior. why this generalizing frenzy?? lmao
Just seems wild to blame USA for exporting cart culture? What's the mechanism with Hollywood? I missed the marvel extended shopping cart universe.
Where did the USA import cart culture from? Mexico?
It seems likely to me that many countries are capable of domestically manufacturing selfish assholes.
I'm trying to think back to the last time I saw a shopping cart in a movie. I think it was probably Terms of Endearment, but I don't think that the cart made it outside.
Greetings from Finland. No deposit required for the carts, yet almost all carts are being returned (I can't remember when I last saw one not returned).
It happens: https://www.is.fi/hs-vantaa/art-2000006387011.html
You have to read between the lines on why that is so.
Wherever you are in Finland is more considerate than wherever I am in in Finland. Often when I arrive at my local Prisma there’s an employee outside wrangling abandoned carts.
Recently in NL many supermarkets have dropped the coin completely. But people have been conditioned for years to return the cart. Though there are cart thieves.
In the UK some places have it, some do not. Lidl does need the coin, Waitrose does not but has a system that stops you taking them out beyond the car park (there are warnings on, other supermarkets do not.
Almost everyone returns them in all the supermarkets in my area.
Same in Germany, it started during Corona, as people should touch things as less as possible.
My elderly mom never shops at Aldi (in the US) because she can't figure out the coin thing. Given that she spends outrageous amounts on groceries, Aldi is losing a ton of money by paywalling the stupid cart.
Aldi is the only place in the US that I know of that uses this system. It works well enough, no carts in the lot, and surprisingly people sometimes leave a quarter in the cart as a sort of “pay it forward” minor charity. (Good because not everyone keeps change these days.)
The only downside of this in the US is that homeless people will tend to hang around Aldi's asking people if they can return their cart to get the coin. Most of them are friendly and thankful but every once in awhile an aggressive person would make me very uncomfortable.
I also expect Aldi management isn't thrilled about homeless people camping outside their stores.
I can't say for the US, but over here the coin system is ubiquitous, and if you've not got a coin you can ask at the service desk and they'll hand you a branded coin to use.
Last time I asked in Canada they just gave me a regular Loonie ($1 coin)
Naww, that is very sweet!
You’re living in some different Germany. In the Germany where I’m living shopping carts are everywhere… (nrw)
In my part of Germany (BW) I also almost never see carts outside of roughtly where they should be. Sometimes they are just lazily pushed under the enclosure (if you want to call it that), but most of the times they are just how they should be.
Took this picture close to the place where I’m living, people just come home with the cart and then drop it outside. This is Germany https://ibb.co/rGXfb0PY
This is the true chaotic neutral option and you see it anywhere that walking is common AND the carts don’t lockup their wheels at the lot line.
However, shopping carts SuCk on anything but smooth cement.
Yeah, looks like NRW alright
Whoa!
PS: This is not meant as snark, but rather an observation, that by means of a small nudge (in this case the coin deposit), people can learn to do the Right Thing. To quote Charlie Munger:
> Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
I always thought it a sneaky way to pay children .25 cents a cart return.
An enterprising 10 year old could rack a few bucks sometimes.
People here too return them. It is a social class question.
The difference between the ratio of people returning their carts at Wal-mart vs at the Natural Foods store where I live is substantial.
Here, US?
you just explained it, they're not coin operated.
I am old enough to have lived in Germany when they were not coin operated, and most carts were returned at that time as well.
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).
> I am old enough to have lived in Germany when they were not coin operated
And now they are again. Some new REWE carts already come without this feature.
At ALDI stores they are!
do people abandon carts there?
It varies.
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.)
I don't get there often enough to know. I would assume it's rare, and ALDI shopper is different than say, a Wal-mart shopper.
I don’t go to Aldi because of the coin thing in the shopping carts. I went there once, didn’t have at change, and had to carry everything until my arms got full, then just left. I’m not going to carry change with me all the time on the off chance I decide to go to Aldi. Every other store lets me take a cart for free, and I return it because it’s the right thing to do and I want them to remain free.
They are still free, since it is a deposit, not a fee. Also don't you need to put in a coin, when you use a locker, in a museum or the library, or the train station? This is ubiquitous here. You don't need to use a real coin, they are also fake plastic coins for only this purpose, you can get everywhere, and also tools, which you put in to unlock, and then can immediately pull out again.
I get that it’s a deposit, but it still means I have to carry a coin, or some kind of slug. It’s one more thing to carry or think about, that other places don’t require.
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.
german precision shopper
What about Gittertiere? https://www.reddit.com/r/Gittertiere/s/KIDj4EhElD
Of course hooligans steal shopping carts. This was about people leaving shopping carts in the parking lot :)
Why do the stores have the coin deposit if leaving the shopping cart, even if you circumvented the deposit, is morally more morally reprehensible than urinating in public?
> Is this a US phenomenon
Yeah, you can kind of do whatever you want here. It's sort of our thing
> 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.
Don't worry. While we don't have the shopping card issue in Germany, we do have the escooter-in-river issue!
Here its mostly teens who throw rental escooters into rivers.
Bad for the rivers, of course, but it amazes me that the teens in Germany are actively engaged in keeping the sidewalks clean.
For the uninitiated, what's the subtext here? Is this about a trend in behavior of teens in Germany?
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.
Yes, it's unfortunately a trend to throw e-scooters into rivers. Unfortunately the government is still not collecting stats about this vandalism. Throwing e-scooters with batteries into rivers is dangerous, because the batteries contain poisonous metals. Unfortunately many people appreciate it when people throw these scooters into the river, because they are "annoyed be them when they are standing in their way on the sidewalk".
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-...
E-Scooters are literally blocking the sidewalks in big cities like Düsseldorf. It's a plague.
If it's on their keychain, do you really think they'd leave their keychain there?
Haha I was wondering if this part was unclear but assumed it was obvious from context, that the cart opener can be removed from the coin slit. Imagine leaving your keyring on your cart... yikes!
> Imagine leaving your keyring on your cart... yikes!
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.
The reason my wife (I have coins) uses them is that it's just easier to access. No need to go through your coins (if you have any), you just put it in.
Good point. Think of the device as a lock pick for Aldi carts you can remove it and don't need to leave your keychain.
It's not a lock pick for the carts, you need to leave it in.
There are some that you don't have to leave in the slot - they got quite widespread a few years back https://www.printables.com/model/430247-shopping-cart-coin-s...
The "coin" part is usually detachable, so no need to leave the whole set of keys with the cart during shopping.
Yes, but they do cost money and effort to get. A 25-50 eurocent coin is probably equivalent.
The only thing that's useful about those things is that it's easier to get them faster.
Where I live it is always 1€ coins.
But leaving it on is a good way to avoid forgetting to it.
There’s ones with a “notch” in the coin part. So you unlock the cart, twist it, pull it out.
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> Masking did absolutely nothing to stop Covid
It did.
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So you think surgeries that are performed without medical masks, wouldn't have a higher infection rate?
I would say not, for airborne viruses. Those masks are to keep the doctor's sweat, hair, and saliva out of the patient.
> Keep on telling yourself that
I will!
> data doesn’t lie
$5 sez you have some data that just so happens to confirm your biases, and i bet there's also some data that says masking actually did help. Utterly pointless arguing this nonsense, in the end it always just turns out to be speed-runs to some tedious conspiracy theories.
People who wonder about this stuff should travel to Japan.
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
Yes, and it generally isn’t because of laws, there’s just a lot of sensible social customs (don’t walk while eating on the street because it encourages litter, etc) and others will remind you of those customs if you break them. And unlike the US, if you break those unwritten rules and then start a fight for “content” when confronted (assault is illegal), police will actually put you in jail or deport you instead of looking the other way.
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.
For the purposes of this specific conversation, the layout of typical Japanese supermarkets, the cost of groceries and the frequent lack of specialized parking for supermarkets, Japan is probably an irrelevant comparison. Where there are parking lots, people typically purchase only what could be carried back to their car without carts. Bicycles are used for shopping with much greater frequency than countries like the U.S. Shopping carts are typically taken and returned at the entrance of the store before the customer exits. At Uwajimaya in the United States (a Japanese asian market with stores in Oregon and Washington), remarkably, the same cultural use of shopping carts occurs.
Most people in Japan live outside of the Yamanote circle in Tokyo. Rural and Suburban supermarkets have parking lots (although in central areas they can still be quite small) and people still use cars for shopping trips, especially in the countryside.
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.
I lived well outside of Tokyo and most supermarkets were eki-mae (near train stations) and did not have parking lots. I did go to markets by car, and the practice I mentioned, shopping carts used exclusively within the store, was practiced. There very well may be exceptions, but as I noted, the cultural practice even extends to Japanese markets in the United States.
This has much to do with the history of Japan and its inhabitants vs the history of the US and the type of people who moved here and occupied / colonized it (don't use "settled", there was no settling, only stealing). The US was largely built on individualism, high risk-high reward, lawlessness, aggression, and a lack of social cohesiveness (don't like it somewhere? there's plenty of other places to go and be on your own). Japan on the other hand, while it had wars/violence too, that happened within a highly structured society built on a form of feudalism.
Yeah it's the small things, friend of mine was in Japan recently and first thing he noticed is that everyone wears backpacks in front of them while riding the train as to not bother others. There are also signs for that (in fact Japan has A LOT of signs for foreigners on what to do).
It's a rare example of a working high-trust society.
Japan also measures the waistline of everyone over 40 and fines their coworkers if they are too fat. Difficult to find a balance with the shame culture. US clearly not enough Japan too much.
They don't fine workers, they fine companies and only after a certain threshold which is rarely enforced. And encouraging not being fat is not a bad thing and shouldn't be controversial, it's healthier overall.
It’s not being healthy that is controversial, it’s the culture of shame that Japan enforces.
Idiotic and completely untrue statement.
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.
The metabo law is absolutely real and coworkers are still to this day being fined by the government because of fatness.
"Fine your coworkers." Looks true:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/mar/19/japan
I keep seeing the argument that non-returners are creating jobs. Does that mean they also throw their trash on the streets so cleaners have to be hired? Should one randomly break into houses so every people need to hire security guards? How about scratching cars on the street so mechanics and painters have some extra work?
I can understand the argument insofar as it's necessary for the business to want it clean, so the result is not a tragedy of the commons.
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.
I also don't want a risk of my car being dented. So there's some tragedy there if it was truly rampant.
>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.
> I can understand the argument insofar as it's necessary for the business to want it clean
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.
There is clearly a tipping point where you either get filthy restaurants, fewer restaurants, or take out only.
Anyways, there is no shortage of necessary low skill labor that can be done unrelated to food or money.
Heck, but jobs mean more cost for the supermarket, meaning their groceries are slightly more expensive... genius argument.
I'm a certified job creator and should therefore pay less taxes
Employees got to pull those carts in by their bootstraps
see the broken window fallacy
> So I approached the question of shopping cart abandonment the way I would any puzzle about human behavior: I collected data. My evidence came from an unlikely source: Cart Narcs, a small group whose mission is to encourage cart return, sometimes gently, sometimes less so.
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.
I have my study with the sample of one as well.
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.
Can't talk about others but for me personally, I:
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!)
I think you're misreading the situation in (2). There is still a social contract to return the carts - just because you put a coin them doesn't make that go away.
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.
No, it may be intended as a fine of sorts, but the explicit number turns it into a cost that people are willing to pay.
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.
> wouldn't the shop need to have someone there to return all the unreturned carts?
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.
This is confusing to me. You value the time to return the cart more than €1, but not more than €0?
It's a similar phenomenon to day cares dealing with late pickups. They have a few chronically late parents, so they institute a late pickup fee. Parents who always picked their kids up on time because of the implicit agreement now have an explicit agreement that it's okay to pick them up late if they pay a bit more. So the incidences of late pickups actually increased at the day care. You're exchanging a trust based system for financial interactions and some people have very different motivations.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468061?seq=1
Putting a dollar amount on it quantifies “how much I’m pissing you off” on something that is assumed to be annoying.
It's not an uncommon reaction. There's lots of things that people are on average perfectly willing to do for free but are not willing to do for a pittance sum.
See donating blood.
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.
> It is done purely altruistically
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.
Popup blood donation sites are pretty common in the US, too, though run by orgs like the Red Cross. I've done it a few times, there's no payment involved besides some free snacks + drinks.
The mindset makes sense if you see his as an implicit service. The equivalent is if there was a dedicated cart collector every 2-3 spaces and you pay them $1 to return your cart. Now you're paying for a service.
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.
I always wondered if there are people who don't have a clear distinction between their private space/home and public space. Whether it's not putting their carts back, or talking loudly on the phone/playing music in a gym or any public space, tossing trash our of car windows, there are some people who seem to inhabit their own inner world so fully that it doesn't register that there are other people around them and that they are using a shared resource.
> Promoting cart return might be as simple as setting a new norm
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?
> 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?
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.
> 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.
Interesting! I've seen this happen a few times, though I've never witnessed something as extreme as a 10+ minute wait just for the off-ramp. I still maintain that it seems dangerous regardless of the situation, because while someone stops and tries to cut in line, the non-off-ramp lane they're stopped on can still keep moving, creating opportunities for collisions.
It's more common in larger metro areas - NYC, LA and Atlanta are infamous for it - but can happen anywhere depending on what is going on further down the exit lane (an emergency vehicle, car breakdown, etc).
Chicago's Lake Shore Drive/Belmont intersection has 3 stoplights you have to pass to get out. During rush hour it sometimes gets so backed up my bus has gotten stuck in it for a half hour. The first light is for the northbound on/off and a small side street that goes to some tennis/etc courts, the second for southbound on/off, and the side street adjacent to LSD splits in two so the third light is for the same street as the second light and is where you can finally enter it.
I think the issue is that the long-term decline in social trust—and the accompanying rise in surveillance, authoritarian enforcement, and costs/prices—happens too slowly for people to notice and associate with their own actions. If every time they left a cart out there was a new camera or scowling security officer on their next visit, they might notice and change their behavior. But as it is, they don’t notice their own contribution to the consequences that they so often complain about.
(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.)
>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?
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.
Zipper merging is the correct merging assuming you keep speeds correct.
States that are “too polite” to do it have to remind people to do it.
https://www.dot.state.mn.us/zippermerge/
A zipper merge is only applicable to a lane that is ending or has an obligation to merge. In exit lane jumping, the car is coming from a lane that does not end and has no obligation to merge. In fact, at their point of entry, you will notice a solid white separating the two lanes, indicating you cannot even legally merge.
There's a difference between zipper merging on a lane closure (which is what the article described) and what the person you are responding to described.
You are not supposed to block your lane of traffic because you didn't want to wait like everyone else.
There's no moral hazard to not brushing your teeth. If you want a healthy society, you have to brush your parking lots.
No moral hazard, but there is a hazard to not brushing your teeth: cavities, and more explicitly, the financial cost of having cavities repaired. Even the best dental insurance plans in America are capped at $1500 - $3000 of benefits a year, usually less than a single root canal or crown.
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:
One explanation I've heard that resonates with me is that we subconsciously feel as if we're playing a more complex and less obvious version of the prisoner's dilemma.
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.
why is returning the cart intrinsically some sign of “goodness” but returning your plates to the kitchen and washing them at a restaurant is not? The customer is at the store to fulfill their needs, not the store’s. Taking the groceries from the checkout to the car in a cart helps fulfill the customer’s aims. Returning the cart does not, same as picking up trash in the store car park does not. And the revenue from customers pays for return of the carts from the parking lot, so most customers feel that is a better deal than a place that forces them to return the carts.
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?
> 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.
That's because the business is trying to save on their own manpower costs by shifting some of the burden to their customers -- much like self-checkout.
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).
By that logic, why not also just throw your trash on the ground? And, if you need to use the restroom while you're there, why not just pee on the floor?
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.
That was unhelpful. You can take almost any logic to an extreme; doesn't mean it's still logical :/
Because the cart doesn’t belong in the road or parking lot the same way your plate doesn’t belong upturned on the floor of the restaurant. I’m not sure about you but I will even stack my plates and dishes and silverware so the bus boy can grab it all in one go. Maybe that makes me some sort of a holy man.
BTW, a lot of bussers prefer you not do that. They have their own system for stacking things in their trays, and they have to un-stack your things to do it their way. Like, they generally can’t pick up your whole tidy stack, set it in their tub, and walk away like that.
My acquaintances in food service tell me they appreciate the thought, but rather you not go through the effort.
I've found an anecdotal correlation that the (relatively few) people that have moralized at me about returning shopping carts also tend to dislike self-checkout at the same stores. I guess it is immoral to have someone return your cart, but moral to have someone scan your groceries? I generally don't return my cart, but I mostly self-checkout. I'm pure evil apparently.
Full-service checkout is a service that is explicitly offered by (most) stores, and yes, it's a service many people like -- in part because of the poor UX of the self-checkout machines. ("Please return item to the bagging area.")
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.
> where are people expected to learn these implicit rules?
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.
With regard to plates...
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 was going to comment this exact thing about stacking plates. I think most servers/ex-servers also do this regardless of age. It's even easier to do than returning a shopping cart.
Parallel but unrelated, you can play these tones [0] to unlock shopping cart wheels that have locked up on you. The literal only times I ever abandon a cart (not return it to the store or cart corral) is when they lock up and I can't move the god damned things -- and the rare times it has happened have been in the middle of aisles where cars are supposed to drive, FULLY LOADED CART, before I ever get to the car to unload.
[0] https://www.begaydocrime.com
It is certainly a US problem.
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.
It’s not that big of a problem. It’s overblown online. At the grocery stores near me, I’d say 95% of carts are returned to the cart corral.
It’s all relative to your locale. When I lived in the city it was a scourge no matter the time of day, didn’t matter which part of town I would go to, some entitled persons would leave their shopping carts in random parking spaces, or in the plant beds, grass medians, etc. with an empty cart return rack mere steps away.
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.
I'm confused. Are you saying that this is a unique problem to the US and that France used to have a different unique problem, that is, in my estimation, worse? And that it was solved by requiring deposits on the carts.
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?
There is a difference between leaving the cart in a random parking lot and not returning it and to decide to just take it (stealing). The latter is a deliberate action, that involves more work, not less.
Yes and yes :)
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
I assume people litter in france which is essentially the same thing: leaving ones problems for others to collect.
I suspect that the reason is: "I don't want to do that, and if I don't do it then somebody else eventually will, and if they don't eventually do it then that's their problem, and in any case I don't care."
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.
I think here the business would rather employ workers to yell at costumers, to return their carts, rather than start to collect them. Well, rather it does not need to employ them, they would do it own their own, but only until after the other costumers failed to yell at these people.
I never return my carts. I used to bag groceries in a grocery store and whenever I got sick of customers and/or coworkers I'd go get the carts. The more carts far out in the parking lot the better, I could an entire shift without being inside talking to customers.
My dad never returns carts. He also worked at a grocery store when he was young and had the same mentality as this. He also said that he is "creating work" for these young kids and it's good for them ha.
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.
I liked getting carts too, but I return mine, because no one else I worked with liked doing it. I’m not going to force someone to do work they might not want to do. I don’t know them, and statistically (from my n of probably 50), most people don’t want to do it… especially in the winter.
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.
Justifying laziness as a mean to maximize menial work really shows the little ways society has slipped off.
Knowing my father, laziness has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Okay but stray carts block parking spaces, reduce accessibility, and damage cars when they roll around.
now you're moving the goalpost. the vast majority of folks that don't return them leave them out of the way
I question this assertion. What 'out of the way' exists in the parking lots you frequent? Every one that I can think of offhand consists of parking spaces, areas for people to walk from their cars, driving lanes and little else. Anywhere you could leave it other than the designated place is causing a problem for someone.
Tell that to the dent in my door.
> now you're moving the goalpost
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...
I'm now completely torn! I always return carts just out of habit as a nice thing to do, but I totally see this as a legitimate reason not to return them! I never worked at a grocery, but I have worked at other jobs where there was that one task that got you out of sight of management so you could take your time and mentally relax for a while. Taking the trash to the dumpster way out back, restocking the walk-in fridge from the basement, etc. It was less about not working, as it was about the freedom.
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!
Leave the carts wherever you will and pull the fire alarm as you leave; free break for everyone!
I assume the issue is apparent.
You're onto something. It's an almost perfect autistic/introvert "slap on some headphones and do something to feel productive without having to engage with humans" task.
But most people hate it, so my wife and I try to show consideration.
These days, there's like 1 kid working an entire grocery store, I don't think they'd love coming back in to an angry crowd of waiting customers.
I return carts, but I too worked at a grocery store and so did a fair amount of cart wrangling, a lot of it during the Phoenix summer. It was very zen, watching the monsoons build. Certainly didn't mind it.
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.
>I don't see why collecting your cart can't be part of that.
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 .
You have to be out there getting them from the corral anyway. There's no people dedicated to collecting carts, it's just a periodic task.
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.
Man, I don't know about you, but:
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.)
I’m sure if we did a study of cart non-returners the vast majority would be moms with bum knees.
>There's no people dedicated to collecting carts, it's just a periodic task.
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.
Ok, but why does not putting a cart in a coral equate to a broken window, but not facing product does not? As the person collecting carts it took me less time to collect 10 "free range" carts than it would have taken those 10 people to return those carts.
>why does not putting a cart in a coral equate to a broken window, but not facing product does not?
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
Ok, so is your primary issue that people don't take the cart all the way to the coral or that they leave them in places that cause problems for people? Because that's two different things.
> And one woman, upon being confronted about leaving her cart, declared, “I have really bad vertigo,” before getting behind the wheel and driving away. To be clear: Disabilities deserve accommodation. But if you could push the full cart to your car, why couldn’t you return the empty one?
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.
Do you make those arguments in good faith?
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.
idk about vertigo specifically (and things laypeople diagnose as vertigo), but yes in that I had a family member who was exactly in this situation. Walking sticks and still very concerned with falling while getting to a cart, then perfectly stable after being able to grab onto something in front of them. Though I highly doubt they themselves left carts around the lot rather than returning them to the closest corral.
How did she get into the supermarket in the first place?
Driving? Plenty of people have personal mobility issues while driving just fine once they're in a car. Have you ever given away used home health aid items on craigslist? It can be a pretty sad scene.
Did she ram her car through the front door?
Sorry, I had misread the comment I was responding to. I had already covered what it was actually asking in my original comment - parking near a cart someone else abandoned, or failing that making her way to the closest one despite difficulty.
Sometimes my cart gets accidentally out of bounds (because I parked too close to the grocer store's property line) and the wheels lock up. Then I try to drag it somewhere out of the way at least.
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.
It’s the wolf/goat/cabbage problem.
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).
Ya, no, thats not very feasible. The child is perfectly capable of surviving for the 30 seconds to one minute needed. The question was about law, not pragmatics, anyways, since those are the times we live in.
> I never did figure out how "leaving kids unattended" laws worked out
That is also exclusively an US problem, and sounds quite insane to my european mind.
I already wrote something else in here, but one other thought I had afterwards was related to IKEA carts -- they have four 360-degree casters, which makes them extra prone to just flying in literally any direction with a bit of wind if they're not returned to the corrals. Strangely enough, I rarely ever encounter an abandoned cart there, or full corrals; they're almost always empty! Curious if IKEA policy is far more rigorous than a grocery store on cart retrieval and return.
Last time I went to IKEA I couldn’t physically get the cart beyond the loading area. There were barricades setup that seemed sized specifically to stop carts from leaving the area.
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.
Many people only use the carts to the loading area which has a well-patrolled corral next to it (any employee tasked with helping you load returns to the building with some or all of the carts).
The 360x4 casters are pretty insane the first time you realize it.
Are we talking about bringing your cart all the way back to the store entrance, or about placing your cart in one of the cart corrals located out in the parking lot? At a large store in the US, the latter are typically provided, and they are nearly always near at hand (maybe 5 spaces away). It's not a far walk.
It’s the latter. The detailed DnD map puts “return cart to store” in lawful good and “return cart to nearby ravine” in chaotic evil iirc.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/jc0az4/...
My memory was decent!
Do people not return carts in your country? I enjoy Cart Narcs but they would have a hard time making content in The Netherlands.
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.
The vast majority do return carts in my country. But when you have 100 customers an hour (which isn't much) and 5% don't return carts that is 5 carts per hour - odds are you will always see a couple carts out of place. The numbers above are made up of course, but the point remains that a small minority makes everyone look bad.
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.
And what country is that? If you're comfortable sharing.
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.
US.
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.
On the other hand, I have a friend who worked in retail as a teenager tell me that employees sometimes appreciate carts getting left out, as it means they get to go for a nice leisurely walk outside, away from the toxic work atmosphere, to go round them up. So while carts getting left out may be positive for other shoppers, it might be doing a disservice to overworked employees.
I don't even think about it. If available, I take it from near where I park and I return it to the front of the store with the rest of the carts. The little tiny bit of extra exercise is nice to clear my head before I start driving.
When it becomes a habit, good deeds become effortless. I wish I could say that about most people.
The shopping centre where I shop frequently (Europe) has a large outdoor parking space and every 20 meters or so there's a little kiosk where you can return the cart. People do because it's actually easier to return it than to worry about crashing into it when you're getting out of the parking spot. From time to time an employee goes out and collects all the carts from kiosks and gets them back to the shop. I don't know if it's the same way in the US, maybe some people don't return it simply because they parked too far from the entrance.
Not so much a kiosk, but American grocery stores often have one parking spot every other row that is blocked off with a fence/barrier and marked as a cart return storage. But that has its own problems because if someone hastily shoves a cart in there instead of stacking them in line it takes up too much space and creates a dangerous extrusion into the adjacent spots.
> And one woman, upon being confronted about leaving her cart, declared, “I have really bad vertigo,” before getting behind the wheel and driving away. To be clear: Disabilities deserve accommodation. But if you could push the full cart to your car, why couldn’t you return the empty one?
Because you need the stability of the cart (as a walker aid) itself.
That leaves me wondering how they got from their car to the cart in the first place, then.
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.
Independent thought and personal accountability are sadly lacking in the US. "I see a bunch of unreturned carts. I must follow and fit it. See im justified in not returning it." :-(
This is closer to a variant of the broken window theory than something that's US-specific. Where I am, people who don't return carts are clearly in the minority, so they probably choose to do it because they think it benefits them greatly.
About once or twice per year, I might leave my cart outside a corral if there's none nearby and I'm sick or in a terrible hurry. (In no cases do I leave it somewhere where it could roll and strike a car)
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.
TFA would be much much better if he'd conducted it across different social/cultural demographics. JP vs EU vs US vs CA for example.
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.
If everyone returns their cart, retailers will certainly eliminate jobs. I see it as “job creator” behavior.
When I see someone returning a cart I scream “job killer!”
Parked overnight at a midwest Walmart (when that was a thing) and got out to do something at 4am trying not to look like a predator. Ten carts were pushed over the embankment into the creek. Lifted them out and put them where they could be hosed off. What gets into people?
I always return my cart to a collection kiosk thing out in the parking lot, or to where the carts are lined up at the store entrance if that's closer. I don't recall when this became a thing, though. Back in the early-mid 1980s as a teenager my first job involved going out into the lot at K-Mart and bringing in all the carts.
Surprised that safety wasn't a statistically significant reason. Pushing your cart to a return exposes one to more parking lot traffic as a vulnerable pedestrian -- particularly worrisome for the elderly. It minimizes risk to leave the cart near your vehicle. Perhaps I have a really solid rationalization at work here :D
> Pushing your cart to a return exposes one to more parking lot traffic as a vulnerable pedestrian
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.
Wouldn't make too much sense because cart kiosks are typically no more than 4-5 parking spaces over. The marginal risk compared to getting to your care are basically nil.
I circumvent the problem by not using carts.
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.
When on an extended trip to Delray Beach, Florida and shopping at the Publix market I tried to walk in with a cart that was lurking in a parking space.
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.
Publix also advises customers not to tip the kid who unloads the groceries into your car. You will accept our service and you will do nothing more!
I once got yelled at by a Safeway employee because I didn't respond to her "have a nice day, sir"
"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)
I didn't see a mention of "they resent being gouged for essentials by oligopolies, and so signal defiance by not returning the cart". But it's real, especially as the cost of living rises faster than inflation.
Since there are rarely compact carts available at the entrance of my local store, I often bring a cart in when I park initially. While more self-serving, where one decides to participate in the shopping cart social contract is of interest as well.
Internet behavioral science with terrible selection bias round 2: classify whether someone will comment here that they don’t put their carts back based on their previous comments. Then, interpret the classifier to see what makes them tick
I watched many Cart Narcs episodes. Always the same, the people look uneducated in every single one of them, mostly "Karen" types. It is about respecting society, and these people don't. In the EU, they respect and care about their society. It is all cultural.
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".
To the contrary, almost all paid airport carts offer a reward for return, but you can always find them abandoned amongst the parking
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.
Or spending 3-4 minutes to return the cart will cost them the same amount of parking fees. Just a thought. I think carts are more complicated than they seem.
Only in the US. Here in Europe people simply return them.
Worse is people who just leave their empty basket behind at the self-checkout till. This isn't sticking it up to the supermarket, this is really just an F U to the next customer...
For me it depends on the store. A normal grocery store: I will always return the cart. A luxury store: I don't, I consider it part of the service that I'm paying more for.
A real luxury store will push your cart out to your car for you and then bring it back.
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)
What the hell is a luxury store? Can you name any brands? I don't think we have them.
The ones I'm talking about don't have brands; they are local boutique groceries.
“Carelessness, in Fitzgerald’s vision, is a way of wielding power. It’s a certainty that the world exists to absorb your damage.”
TIL "Cart Narc" is an actual thing.
I think it also explains why most people don't rate after transactions in Facebook marketplace.
People in this country can’t even bother to put their carts back and you think they’re not going to get replaced by AI?
Well, AI would take a long time to properly corral all shopping carts back to the store. Much easier to have it product slop and replace passionate underpaid creators.
This is a little amusing to me because at a supermarket I cycle to there's a bit of a general understanding that there should be a stash of carts near the bike stands, so I can usually arrive, pick up one from there, then leave it there for the next person, and save everyone some time.
Asociality, laziness and entitlement, not necessarily in that order.
Wrong conclusion. Not «people», but customers at that particular store.
Well, duh. The least you can do is wheel it into the nearby cart corral, where the store employee will shepherd them all back in with a CartManager XD (whose name is extra hilarious to me). If you know anybody who's worked in retail you understand the suckage of drawing the short straw of having to round up all the carts, especially in inclement weather.
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.
> a CartManager XD (whose name is extra hilarious to 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...
25 carts is nothing; that’s a single man job.
I’ve seen those trains sticking so far out of a target it’d make Union Pacific blush.
I find it funny because XD is an emoticon for a Cartman face and Cartman... CartManager... XD
What I find fascinating is the mental gymnastics people go through to justify not returning their shopping cart. It's not enough to simply be quietly selfish. Peoplw want affirmation for their actions. Often you don't need to return it to the store. There are return bays scattered all ove rthe car park. The goal is fairly simple: carts can cause accidents, damage vehicles or simply block parking spots.
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.
America fails the shopping cart test and it really reflects on how we treat the rest of our culture. I dont know if the chicken came before the egg, but the behavior shows nonetheless.
People can push the full cart 2 miles all around inside Costco but not an extra 30 feet to return an empty cart to a cart corral? There's no reason for it. It's one of the best indicators of narcissistic individuals - the other is treating restaurant servers poorly.
You mention Costco as an example and claim that the return is (on average?) 30 feet away from your vehicle? Did you mean meters? Either way quite an underestimation. At our local meglo market (owned by Kroger) there isn't a return for every parking aisle. The distance and exposure to traffic to use a return is quite variable and can be significant. My local store is large enough that they have a cart returner as a dedicated position.
The stores literally have people who are paid to collect the carts.
From the cart corrals. Do you leave trash on the ground because they have people paid to empty the trash cans?
I don't leave trash on the ground because littering is against the law.
Is the law the only thing that stops you from littering?
So you only do things if there is a specific law that compels you? There is no moral compass?
If laws were loosened up and littering was no longer punishable, would you begin littering? Is hypothetical legal recourse the main thing that would motivate you not to act in a certain way?
I'd love to see anyone get charged for literring in a fast food establishment.
“But you see, restaurant servers understand that a certain percentage of customers will treat them poorly, and yet they choose to work the job anyway. In effect, it is priced in to their wage. In fact, by treating them even worse, I may actually make their wage go up by increasing the wage demanded!” —some HN commenter, probably
USA safari
It would be useful if the author tried to classify by age. Would be nice to see if this is a boomer problem, or a general problem.
Seems early posters are blaming the customers, but at least in Canada the grocery stores treat their customers with so much disdain that i see no problem with people leaving their cart wherever, if it can make more trouble for loblaws et al. Framing helping out a hostile oligopoly as “doing the right thing” is nonsense.
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.
If you want to cause trouble for Loblaws, don't shop at Loblaws and other chains of theirs. Willingly giving them your money, and then performatively "retaliating" by making the life of the minimum-wage employee (who would be here either way) slightly harder is completely useless as a form of protest. This feels like a rationalization for not taking the cart back by trying to hand-wave it to some large systematic actors. But the whole point is that the shopping cart choice is always a hyper-local choice. It's only about you, other customers and the people working at the store, not some distant megacorporation.
I'm returning my cart not because of my support of grocery stores but because I care about other customers: abandoned carts getting in the way of walking/parking, may damage cars and just in general clutter the space
I'm honestly surprised stores don't make you enter your email address, phone number, or shoppers card to use the cart.
Honestly, the thing that bothers me the most about the article is that I learned there are people who not only go around telling people they didn't return their cart, but that they film the people as they do so. That type of online vigilante/public shaming is bad, IMHO. And then the public voyerism of everyone watching it and maybe commenting on it. Such strange human behavior. I can see why many people would respond with "who the fuck are you to be filming me".
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Cart Narc's formula is a fantastic way to end up harassing people with invisible disabilities.
Hell, a few times the victim has been someone with a visible mobility disability and they kept on harassing.
I don't see mention of parenting.
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?
I'm a parent with a child with profound autism. You leave your kid in the car for the 30 seconds it takes to return the cart. It's never been an issue and the kiddo is perfectly content waiting for a short period while I walk the cart back.
My god, people act like there's kidnappers at every grocery store just waiting for this one moment to abduct a child.
I looks more this is about managing fears and worries. This is also close to helicopter parenting, i.e. parents who are "overattentive and overly fearful for their child, particularly outside the home".
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.
> I don't see mention of parenting.
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?
All I'm asking is that we give caregivers a little empathy and some grace. To your question - There's not much risk. Lock the car, 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.
>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.
It's not hard. Lock the car and return the cart. Your kid(s) will be fine unattended in the car for 20 seconds crying or not. If this really distresses you, park in the back by a cart corral.
I’ve accidentally parked inside a larger cart corral - I thought it was a space between two.
Menards corrals are literally carports they sell in the store (and hence covered which is nice).
Menards does have huge cart corrals. The corrals have never been empty enough for me to confuse it for a parking spot, but without carts it would fit a car just fine. It's odd that they don't have dividers. Then again Costco doesn't either.
They're literally their carports - they even have a sign on them telling you how to order one for yourself.
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.
I had to check the Menards website. I knew Menards sold everything but it never dawned on me that they literally sell those carports. I didn't know that's what those structures were called either. That's a good point about the large lumber carts.
Apparently they sell 613 variations (mostly different lengths and heights and widths, probably four parts total).
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...
That's pretty amazing. I didn't think any retailer sold house kits akin to the Sears catalog homes I've read about.
Not a bad price.
I usually just leave them in the cart and we go and return it together. Or now as they became older - they push it themselves to the corrals (with me next to them of course).
Feels like a lazy justification
> 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.
If you can't leave your kid unattneded for 30 seconds, I'd worry about bringing them in for an hour long shopping trip to begin with.
It takes 30 seconds.
Congratulations on being the subject of the thread.
imagine thinking returning your cart after putting your kid in the car is a bad option.
I already checked out my own groceries. I'll just leave it in the parking lot for someone who works at the store to retrieve it.
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.
I have gone ice skating a lot in the past. Many people rent the skates from the establishment. I don't think I have ever seen anyone, after skating, just leave their rented shoes by the lockers/benches when the switch back to their own shoes. They always return the rented shoes to the desk, even when there is a short lineup at rush hour.
It's very strange that people think the same courtesy should not be extended to shopping carts.
You don't rent the cart. What if you had to clean your own table at Applebees?
If I go to a fast food restaurant, where you order and collect at the counter, and where I don't see the staff cleaning the tables between customers, I do wipe down my table with the provided napkins.
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.
We do that in Sweden if the kids made a mess. Same in Denmark, Norway, Finland, Netherlands and I'd assume Japan and Korea as well.
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.
>What if you had to clean your own table at Applebees?
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.
No the problem is people who leave them in thr parking. Unless you return it you’re making everyone else pay for returning _your_ cart. Plus of course making the parking harder to use in the meantime.
Just return the cart.
You could say you create a paid job by not returning your cart. The downsides I see is that free wheeling carts can cause accidents (eg during wind) and create annoyances such as blocking parking spaces. We could probably find some more arguments on both sides. Personally, I consider the downsides to outweigh the pros, which is why I consider it to be the right thing to return it.
On the other hand, it can be convenient to grab a loose cart that's near your parking space, instead of having to un-jam a cart from the 50 that are stacked inside each other at the front of the store.
The relevant element to me is less the rational construct behind my actions but what the social contract and environment expects of me. I can violate those rules but then have to live with the consequences. In cases such as this I prefer peace over conflict. It’s a small price to pay for me to return the cart and what I gain is not to cause unhappiness in those around me and thus in myself. This is reason enough for me to do it. In other cases, I might want to demonstrate that I do not agree, but I try to be conscious in what fights I want to invest my energy in.
> I'll just leave it in the parking lot
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?
I'm with 4chan on this one. The actual problem is people like you.