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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
102 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 93.5 ms ] thread>“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.”
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.
In Germany I see far fewer abandoned shopping carts than in America.
* Not considering physical limitations.
You gain something if others put their trolleys away. You gain something [fuzzy] knowing you may have helped others. We have these mechanisms of cooperation that some people eschew, that some demand, and coin-release trolleys are the response to what happens when it breaks down.
Coincidentally a supermarket near me has recently converted their trolley stock to coin-release. I have three children and increasingly few Pound coins so a result of this is I shop less, and far less impulsively. Good job, Tesco.
People here have mentioned it only taking 30-60 seconds, which definitely speaks to European centric stuff. A lot of the places I’ve shopped where I’m using a cart, it takes minutes to return. That’s why people aren’t doing it. You spend 1-2 minutes walking to your car. That’s why they leave the cart, it’s an extra 5 minutes round trip. But for an employee who is going to be going around the lot anyway to do this job, it’s no extra added time.
This also ignores that people like me will sometimes pickup a cart like this on the way to store if it’s convenient. We also don’t leave them in parking spaces or whatever. We leave them somewhere reasonable.
Leaving carts means someone must retrieve.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.begaydocrime.com
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.
But most people hate it, so my wife and I try to show consideration.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
If your interpretation is true, wouldn't the shop need to have someone there to return all the unreturned carts? I have never seen such a person. Of course, if carts are in the parking lot, eventually an employee might come to return them, but it's not the intended way of handling it.
The 1€ is a deposit, and you lose it if you fail to do what is right, but the social contract to return the cart is still there, just because money is involved, doesn't mean all ethical considerations go out of the window. Returning it is still the right thing to do. The 1€ is there as an incentive for those who would just not return it if it wouldn't cost them.
First example I heard of this shift was with daycares that had trouble getting parents to pick up their kids on time, so they put a fine on it for having to stay late. This ended up increasing the problem because now there was compensation instead of guilt, and parents could make the decision that the cost was worth it.
I assume it's like the bottle deposit. If enough people leave a coin in the cart and walk away someone will start returning them of their own volition just to earn the coins.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/jc0az4/...
My memory was decent!