If you scatter carts in random places the supermarket has to employ someone to collect them. So you are a job creatorTM. This is why I never return my cart, and also why I jump on cartons of milk in the dairy aisle and take a dump in the broccoli.
People who actually think this are using it as an excuse for their bad manners.
The person employed by the supermarket to gather carts is not employed to return your cart to the cart return near your vehicle. They are employed to gather the carts from the cart return near your vehicle and bring them back to the store building’s cart return.
By doing this, you do not create more jobs (as the cart return employee position already exists whether you return your cart or not), you create more work for an already probably underpaid employee and you also increase everyone’s autoinsurance because when the wind blows the carts damage other people’s vehicles.
OK, you got me, I actually always return my cart and seldom shit in the broccoli.
… But what about the milk?
That information is classified. But you’ll know it when you see/smell it.
It’s the same person that makes a mess and thinks “it’s the janitor’s job”.
I definitely have the unpopular opinion of disagreeing. As much as I’d like to employ manners with my grocery store, if there’s no corral within a 30 second walk from me, I don’t put the cart back. Most of my purchases are under 8 items and I usually don’t use a cart so I just carry everything by hand in the store and out.
My grocery store doesn’t care about manners on their end. It treats me like an economic unit and even makes self checkout the most reasonable option. They’d have me clean the floors as part of the checkout if they could. From a utilitarian perspective, it makes more sense for one person to gather all the carts in a batch rather than each individual going back for their individual cart.
The insurance rates thing is a legitimate point ( insurance is a racket, though. Fuck those guys too)
“They don’t have good manners, so I won’t have good manners” is a terrible way of thinking and living. If everyone did this, it would only take one person to completely eradicate good manners from humanity forever.
Yeah I see your point and I’ve got amazing manners with human beings. It’s a view I personally reserve for companies. And the larger they are, the less I respect them enough to have ‘manners’ towards them.
Perhaps it’s the inability for people to treat corporations the way corporations treat people that leads to such a power differential.
Except that loose carts roll away and get blown by the wind scratching other people’s cars. Carts put up on curbs and in gravel etc. ruins the wheels making everyone’s experience worse. Carts left in the parking lot block spaces so people can’t park in lots that already sometimes are overfilled.
You’re not ‘sticking it to the man,’ the store owner or corporate shareholders who make the rules and set the prices don’t care, you’re making life worse for your fellow shoppers.
From a utilitarian perspective
Pretty sure that’s not what utilitarianism means lol
Maximizing the utility of labor? I’m alluding to using the components of the scenario in the most efficient way.
How would you express it?
The “utility” of utilitarianism isn’t that type of utility. IIRC it generally refers to the idea of maximizing happiness and minimizing harm, with a focus on outcomes of the whole, rather than the individual. Efficiency of labor doesn’t explicitly factor into it.
Personally, I think you’re just rationalizing being lazy and potentially causing harm to others, which isn’t utilitarian at all.
Nice thing about working class parents… when you’re a kid and think “but it’s someone’s job, they get paid to do it,” they will teach you that it has nothing to do with making more work for someone.
I actually use this rationale for why I don’t use the self-checkout lanes. Why should I do the work for the grocery store that they should be paying somebody else to do?
My local supermarket added 8 self checkout machines, and removed almost all the cashier lanes.
For a year, they pushed everyone towards the self checkout. Every… Body. Old people were clogging up the Customer Service section because they want a human. The machines constantly failed to scan, and people would just shrug and pretend like it did.
The deviants started to realize it’s super easy to steal, as they can just pay for 1/10 of their groceries and “forget” to scan a lot of things. They started to lock up a lot of merchandise, and you need a human to unlock it.
So now they have hired security guards to then scan receipts, as well as follow people in the parking lots.
The whole supermarket is kind of a shit show. I counted 5 security guards to 2 workers when I was last there. I also do my shopping elsewhere.
You return your cart because it’s the right thing to do
I return my cart because it gives me a sense of superiority
We are not the same
You return your cart because it’s the right thing to do
I return my cart to get my euro back that I put in to unlock it
Mr fancy pants here with full euro coins.
I treasure my red plastic €0.50 coin replica more than my life.
I put in a 2€ and look down on other shoppers
Why not just 3D print a few more?
Why 3d print them when the same supermarket gives them out for free?
Wait, they do? Why would they do that?
Eh, 'cause otherwise people will have to exchange money for coins, sometimes people don’t have notes to exchange, etc… Seems like retaining the token is incentive enough to return the cart…
Why not just ask for another one?
You guys can use €0.50 coins?! Over here in Australia it’s either a $1 or $2 coin. I wish I could chuck a 50¢ piece in the trolley.
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I straighten them because they annoy me lol.
I’m also a cart-straightener
Blows my mind how some people actually manage to walk their cart to the corral, and then decide they’re going to abandon any semblance of order in putting the carts away, you’ve already done the hard part by walking over, it takes less than a second to just not be an idiot when you push your cart in there.
Big carts in one line, small carts in the other, seems easy but they all put the square peg in the round hole.
And at least try to line them up. I don’t care if you push them all the way in, just try to line them up so that they can be pushed together.
No one will punish you for not returning the cart
My opinion on this is reason number 8735 why I will never, and should never, be in charge of a country.
I too have thousands of reasons why I shouldn’t be in charge of a country, however I do have one good pitch.
My appointment to dictatorship would be guided solely by autism. I guarantee my powers will only be focused upon my two fixations that deal with the general public, trains and healthcare.
If made supreme leader I will not only make the trains run on time, there will be more trains, more hospitals, we would even have trains that can take you to your job at the hospital. I would shape the perfect world for me, and vicariously a more efficient and safer world for you.
Demand Me for dictator 2024
Why not put the hospital in the train? Instead of taking the train to the hospital, the hospital comes to you
Tbh, I would love to see it. But our railway infrastructure is dog shit atm, and we wouldn’t be able to expand the network fast enough to accommodate something as luxurious as a railway hospital until much later.
My first goal would be to expand the network to the point where cars are unnecessary for the vast majority of my citizens. This would both increase rail traffic to acceptable levels and help alleviate the unnecessary healthcare cost and harm of motor vehicle accidents.
Become my peon, every peon gets healthcare and can apply to drive an electric train. Me -2024
I’d vote for you.
In the UK you have to put a £1 coin in to unlock it. Whenever you return the trolley back, it gives you the coin back
I would add scooping dog shit is another test. There are people out there who will bag the shit and then leave the bag on the ground for the poop to steam in for a few days before they put another bag right next to it to keep it company.
Don’t be a lazybones folks!
I’ve always told my family I like to build up “cart karma.” You get karma by bringing a cart in with you from the parking lot, or returning the one you use after. You lose karma by leaving your cart in the parking lot. Even if I’m going in for a single item, I’ll take a cart in from the parking lot with me and leave it in the rack by the store.
I don’t really care about cart karma, it’s just a way of saying that it seems like the nice thing to do.
st peter at the pearly gates: “yup, looks like you’re up 14 carts overall. welcome to heaven.”
That goes for everything you can return but don’t have to. You can throw your trash away after the movie, you don’t have to leave it in the theatre.
slight flaw in this theory, I always return the cart and will often return other carts as well. despite this, I am terrible at self governing to the point of nearly failing out of college. that being said return your carts you bastards
As a combination cart pusher and cleaner for a supermarket, absolutely fuck anyone that doesn’t return their cart or worse, throws it into a gardenbed
nah fuck that shit. there are staff paid to do it and if the store can’t afford that staff they are fucking lying. they have earned this with the price fixing and gouging and I’m not giving them any more of my time than absolutely necessary.
in addititon when I had that job myself, more often than not people put them away wrong and I had to redo everything. I’ve gotten called to the office more than once because shoppers that put the carts away didn’t lock them somewhere along the stack and the whole thing rolled across the lot and smashed in to someone’s car. Collecting lose carts is way easier than pulling them alll apart and putting them back after finding the two near the middle beginning of the chain and not being able to get them back together without doing it one by one in the stupidly hilly lot.
I never considered the counter argument: Americans are too stupid to operate shopping carts 😱
Apparently there is some validity to that.
But assuming basic human competency that the rest of the world casually exhibits, successfully putting your shopping cart back is a mark of common decency and failure to do so is either a moral failing or a sign that the person should absolutely NOT be allowed to operate a vehicle
“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…”
Hmmmm, I wonder if this is always true. Maybe somewhere there is someone who does not let such things stand.
In Germany, shopping carts typically have a deposit system, where you have to insert an Euro into the cart to use it, which you get back when you return it. So that is basically a build in fine for not returning it.
This is how it works in all of Europe
The past year or two I’ve found several stores where they are abandoning it. I presume because people carrying cash, especially coins, is becoming rarer and they don’t want to inconvenience their customers?
Strangely enough, carts still get returned even at these stores.
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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.
Well the discussion started off ok before ending in a rabies infested rant against humanity! Talk about going off the rails!
Anyhow, many people return the trolley so they don’t look bad/feel guilty. That doesn’t necessarily make them ‘good’ or ‘civilised’ and therefore fit into the ‘being forced’ category through peer pressure. Does that make them ‘animals’ and ‘savages’ too?
Here’s the thing - most of the people who don’t return their shopping carts don’t even know that this is a test. If they did, their behavior would change. If you know about the test, it fundamentally voids the test. And that is what makes it valid. If there is no pressure, what do they do?
Or you could just not judge strangers who are in a rush.
You can typically tell when someone is in the kind of rush that’d excuse being a jerk to others
Theres lots of reasons someone might feel or be incapable of following all of the social norms. Good and bad reasons. Since we can’t know which is which at a glance its best to withhold judgment.
Although some cases are like 99% sure and you can totally judge their pants off all you want.
I feel like this was chosen specifically because it’s one of those cases where it’s easy to tell.
For instance, there was a Walmart next to a bus stop I used to take. People had to take their groceries to the bus, but Walmart didn’t put a shopping cart corral within like 200 meters of it. I don’t really blame people too harshly for leaving their carts there, if they’re taking a big load of groceries on the bus.
Fwiw it’s not that it’s a social norm that is important, it’s it’s natural as a social good, and it’s nature as something (typically) trivial to do.
Its neither a good or bad. It could be argued either way, which makes it a matter of opinion.
You even have cart returners here in this thread arguing to not return them in some cases.
The real answer is that whether you put a cart back or not says nothing about someone’s character.
It’s absolutely a good.
The only “cart returner” I saw against it basically just claimed that the people in their town/state/country were too incompetent to operate shopping carts (even if that’s not what they explicitly said) so idk if i really trust them or want to use that as a measure.
Making work for others to save yourself some trivial amount of work absolutely says something about your character
Goodharts law in action
