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)
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
50 eurocent coins are actually about the same size as 1 and 2 euro coins, so that’s why
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.
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
deleted by creator
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.
Murica, fucked up because of shopping carts. In germany you have to put money in the cart, and get it back while bringing the cart back to where it is from. Problem solved.
Murca has invented these little devices that trick the machine so you don’t have to put in a quarter.
They’ll do anything to avoid being decent lol
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
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
My favorite part about when this gets posted is that there is always someone trying to justify not putting the shopping cart back.
Edit: didn’t even have to scroll half a screen length lmao.
Okay, at the risk of down votes, I’ll take the bait.
My first job was more than 3 years of collecting carts. In that time it’s easy to see patterns like where carts often end up. Some are left out in the open, near a slope where the slightest breeze will animate it. Others pushed up on the sidewalk to the side of the store where there’s not much traffic and they just pile up. And others still will be left along a common walking path, not blocking the path, secure but not stuck.
Those last ones often take care of themselves because so many people walk along that path, it’s trivial to grab it on your way in, and it’s faster than pulling a cart backwards out of the entryway where they’re stored.
Years later, I’m picking up something for my nephew’s birthday party. I park the car. There’s a cart in the position mentioned above: on my way, not blocking anyone, secure but easy to grab. So I grab it, walk inside, do my shopping, come out, unload it. Nearest return is back inside the store, or I can put it back where I found it securely, along the way, but out of the way. I choose the latter. Before I even get in my car someone has grabbed the cart on their way in.
I fail to see the problem. However, the person who grabbed the cart was talking loudly to her grandchild so I could hear, “his legs must be broken since he can’t put the cart back” 😤
TL;DR In a post about returning your carts, a job which I had for over 3 years, the most obnoxious person I encountered was not someone who put their cart in the wrong place, but a passive-aggressive, self-righteous, loudmouth who was so narrow minded they couldn’t see there are spots carts can be left that save both parties time and create no additional work, even as she benefitted.
I was also a cart pusher for 3 or 4 years. It wasn’t my only task most of the time I was actually in the store bagging groceries. I loved cart pickup. It meant I could walk around the store parking lot, grab some fresh air and listen to some music. It was a cool little escape from the monotonous in store work and no one was really keeping an eye on me out there so I could take a little extra time.
I’m not weighing in on whether people should leave their carts out just adding some perspective that gathering them up wasn’t like this huge added labor, quite the opposite. If I wasn’t gathering carts I would’ve just been assigned to something much less enjoyable.
Fucking SAME! It is the best part of the job. I hated people putting the carts back. Take it! Take it as far as you can! I will milk that hunt for another 5/10 minutes of not being inside bagging groceries.
Brother in carts 💪
All the people here saying “you’re creating work over overworked employees” has clearly never worked in a grocery. You’re creating breaks. The only exception is people who left them out at close time when you’re all going home. Those people can burn.
I’m with y’all there. On top of dealing with customers, it was pretty gross work: dumping the sticky bins when the bottle return was full; Mopping up messes; Emptying trash and throwing it in the compactor. Weather permitting, carts were definitely the easiest.
Going for stray carts at the outer edges = quiet walk without any customers or managers.
We have now this in Migros and Coop:
Place it in the stack at the checkout where you unload it and go. Kinda breaks that test. And a headache less for the clerks.
Pretty sure the original post is written in the context of a typical large US supermarket with outdoors parking lot.
There people often buy more groceries then they can carry so they go with the cart to their cars to unload them. After doing that you’re supposed to push the cart back to one of cart sheds located in the parking lot, yet many people just leave it where they unloaded it and drive away.
“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.
