Another possibility is that people that don’t return the cart may not be having their needs met. A person who is tired after walking across the hot parking lot may not return it out of a desire to maintain a modicum of health. Or, perhaps, they may not think about it because their cognition is temporarily hindered by hunger, exhaustion, or some other carnal need.
On Maslow’s hierarchy, I’d say if a person meets all of their physiological and safety needs they are more likely to return the cart than those who do not.
If they’re so tired after walking around the shop and walking back to their car that they can’t do that tiny bit more and return the cart to the corral, maybe they should be seeing a doctor to see if they are eligible for disability (sounds like a severe case of lazybonesitis) and use a handicapped spot. Or you know, stop being so fucking lazy and making excuses.
I’m a fan of the Capitalist Realist Shopping Cart Theory, myself.
Putting shopping carts away is bad for society and you should stop doing it.
The reason is that putting a shopping cart away requires labor, labor requires a person to do it, and the person who has to do it is employed by the grocery store.
Thus, if enough people refuse to put their shopping carts back, enough excess labor will be generated at grocery stores around the country that they will be forced to hire more people to do it, creating jobs.
QED
This is just “littering is fine because it’s someone’s job to pick it up” with extra steps.
Littering has environmental impact, and looks bad. Carts being put back by the company or the customer doesn’t hurt the environment. If it looks bad the company creates a job to ensure the customer keeps coming.
The cart carrier’s job will still be there regardless. I take my cart to the stall, they take it to the store, and nobody has to deal with loose carts. My social responsibility is not impacting anyone’s job in this case.
You can’t reason with these cart extremists because the only thing they actually care about is their car not being dented by a cart.
something something glaziers fallacy.
Obviously this is a joke, but if it even sounded remotely plausible to anyone reading fix yourself.
glaziers fallacy
TIL a new fallacy. I was joking just for the record, I called it “capitalist realist” specifically to try and indicate that it’s the kind of thing you might believe only if you were extremely economics brained.
yeah I figured you were, but it seemed like some people were actually engaging with it. As if make-work somehow made the line go up.
There’s a fun joke:
2 economists are out walking. The first economist sees a pile of dog shit and says to the other, “I’ll pay you $50 to eat that dog shit.” So he does and gets paid $50. Later on, the second economist sees a pile of dog shit and says to the first, “I’ll pay you $50 to eat that pile of dog shit.” So he does and gets paid $50.
The first economist says, “I can’t help but feel we just ate dog shit for nothing.” “Nonsense,” says the second economist, “We just contributed $100 to the economy.”
Of course actual economists aren’t this terrible, but the popular perception of economics/monetary theory is about this braindead.
But is creating those jobs actually something we want? How much does someone get paid for collecting carts? How much does that increase prices for basic necessities? Do we have a labor surplus such that any job is a good job?
The answer to all of those is “no.” I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather keep my office job than go collect carts, so I put my cart away so the person would would have that job can get a better job.
So my personal take on shopping cart theory is that it assumes putting away shopping carts is not a fun job.
I have worked at whole foods for 2 years, and the thing I hated the most was how it felt like Bezos’s watchful eye was always on you. The supervisors could be super persnickety about your breaks. Compared to my new life as a self employed musician, it was like prison, but that’s retail for ya.
I personally loved cart duty. It was a time when I could go outside, get some fresh air, and not be under the surveillance of that god awful company*.
So now if it is a nice day out, I will go out of my way to put the cart in left field. I call it a chaotic good move.
That said the “it keeps jobs” is BS. If cart duty wasn’t a thing, the person would still be filling baskets and cleaning windows.
*Note: the Halstead location in Chicago was actually really great. Maybe it was the Stockholm syndrome of working retail during pandemic, maybe it was Midwestern kindness, but that team actually seemed to care about each other’s wellbeing and we’d even hang out. I lean towards Midwestern kindness though, I moved here from Seattle and while I miss the mountains, I CERTAINLY do not miss the social scene. Despite what the news tries to tell you, Chicago takes care of its own. Even when I was a stranger in a strange land, and then homeless during polar vortex, the people took me in. Every. Night.
Not sure if I’d visit, but I’d definitely live here.
Sorry for the Chicago tangent, I’m a few handshakes deep and I get emotional about this fuckin’ place.
Show us one example literally anywhere that actually did that. Philosophy is not an excuse for being a lazy jerk.
hmm no this seems wrong. If the parking lot is a mile long and there are no cart returns it makes me a bad person if I rack the carts in a line with all the others in the boonies? If you are getting abandoned carts its probably because you don’t have enough cart returns, not because people are bad
If you’re consolidating abandoned carts in the fringes, that makes you just as good, since you are creating a new cart return area that others might also contribute to. But when there are multiple cart returns that are partially used and still carts left on the way in various places in spaces, on the curb, and even right near the entry, those people are at a minimum lazy. My example is a Walmart that never fails this, so perhaps that skews things a bit.
It’s the ones left almost at the store that get me…you could have gone a bit farther. Why did you stop?
I’ve seen abandoned carts within 10 feet of the cart return. Numerous times. I’ve seen people leave their cart behind the parked car next to them and drive off. Some people are animals.
Ok granted I was being too kind for a generalization there. The core of it is that I think that there is still a line that this absolute judgement skirts around precisely because there are so many extreme bad examples. When does the walk back become unreasonable? If costco eliminated all cart returns would you walk your cart to the door or rack it on the curb and become an animal?
I have shopped at places without cart returns. I bring it back inside. Always. It takes 1 minute.
Likewise if you’re a smoker - you should go directly to jail.
I agree that people should put the carts where they go, but this whole “I’m a better human because I put carts back” thing just reeks of unredeemable people scouring their existence for a single redeeming property.
