Posted on 11/28/2025 8:03:12 AM PST by MtnClimber
I arrived on the scene early one Saturday. The suspects were long gone, but the evidence remained. 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. My question: Why don’t people return their shopping carts?
I’m a psychologist who has spent the past decade studying how we think about our own behavior in relation to others. Perhaps the choice to not return a shopping cart seems trivial, but what we do with our cart says a lot about how we think about others and what we believe we owe one another (or don’t).
I’ve never understood why people don’t put their carts away. In high school, I worked as a shopping cart attendant at my local grocery store, shepherding carts across the lot. Since then, for reasons I can’t fully explain, people’s failure to return their carts bothers me more than it probably should, with every trip to the grocery store a reminder of the special kind of havoc humanity is capable of.
Then last year, on a windy weekend morning in a Wegman’s parking lot, it hit me. Not a cart, but the realization that I can do something productive about it.
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. They upload their efforts on their YouTube channel, which boasts hundreds of videos recorded between 2020 and 2025, taking place mostly in California, but also Nevada, Texas, Louisiana, New York, Canada, Australia, and England. Cart abandonment, it turns out, knows no regional bounds. As of September 2025, these videos have collectively been viewed over 90 million times. (See below for one of the tamer videos.) [Video at link]
I watched a total of 564 encounters between Cart Narcs and cart abandoners. These don’t represent a perfectly random sample of interactions, but together they capture a broad cross-section of everyday behavior. (And, as far as I know, it’s the largest archive of shopping cart behavior available.) Most interactions begin the same way: Someone leaves their cart and a Cart Narc requests they return it. At this point I documented what happened next, transcribing parking lot reactions word for unhinged word. To be clear, this was not a quick process. I spent dozens of weekend hours hunched over my computer pausing and replaying YouTube videos. People in my life called this “concerning” and a “waste of time.” I called it research.
My approach was inductive, which is a fancy way of saying that I had neither theory nor hypotheses. Instead, I let the data speak for itself, coding people’s raw (and wildly unfiltered) responses. Over time, patterns emerged, and eventually, I was left with a detailed catalog of behavior, complete with justifications, deflections, hostility, and, miraculously, humanity.
Why don’t people return their carts?
People had all sorts of reactions to being asked to do the right thing (see Figure 1). There were those who deflected, challenging the question itself rather than answering it. Do you work here? Are you the cart police? Do you represent this company? Who are you? Can I see your ID? Do you have any authority? Who do you work for? Who do you think you are? Why don’t you get a real job?
Figure 1: People’s responses to being asked to return their cart. Note: Responses are not mutually exclusive.
Some responded with anger and aggression. They yelled, cursed, and mocked. Some threatened to (or did) call law enforcement. Others escalated further, brandishing weapons like guns, tasers, or knives. “I’m gonna slash your face,” warned one man. “Why don’t I kick your ass?” asked another. A third shopper told the Cart Narc, “This is how you get killed.” If only returning the cart stirred as much passion as did refusing to.
Then there were the many, many excuses. In over half of the encounters I watched, shoppers provided at least one justification for their choice to abandon the cart (see Figure 2).
Many invoked entitlement, sometimes mentioning an identity they believed exempted them from common decency. “I worked at Safeway for lots of years and people left their carts all the time,” one man said. Another explained his choice to leave his cart by saying, “After 40 years of working retail grocery, I’ve earned it.” Earned what, exactly? The right to not pick up after yourself?
There were those who cited physical limitations barring them from cart return. “I’m 72 years old. I can’t walk that far,” explained a man after pushing his cart to the furthest edge of the lot. Another shopper clarified her choice to leave the cart in the middle of a handicap parking spot by mentioning, “I’m handicapped myself.” 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?
Figure 2: Excuses provided for not returning the cart. Note: These excuses are not mutually exclusive.
Other people were simply too busy to return their carts. “I’m over an hour late to my own kid’s birthday party,” revealed one hurried shopper. “We have somewhere we need to be,” another alleged, before spending the next eight minutes arguing with the Cart Narc about how he didn’t have time to return his cart. Some mentioned inconvenience. “Them carts don’t even roll,” one shopper complained, after going out of his way to dig the wheels of his cart straight into grass and dirt.
Many justified their behavior by invoking norms and pointing to other cart abandoners. “Everyone else puts them there,” one shopper said, leaving his cart with a gaggle of similarly unreturned ones. “The culture around here is doing it,” insisted another, as if not returning one’s cart were a local tradition. This reasoning—everyone else does it—pairs best with a juice box and a timeout. If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?
Another type of excuse invoked other people by shifting responsibility (or blame) to others. Many shoppers pointed to their choice to leave the cart as a form of job stability or creation. “They pay someone to collect them all” explained one man. Another insisted that returning the cart is selfish because, “You’re putting someone out of a job.” It’s true that many stores do employ people to gather carts, but the job is to collect them from designated return areas—not to chase them down across the lot like loose cattle........SNIP
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And I always say hi to the cart jockeys, who tend to be special needs folks, and give them a Christmas card with a generous tip at Christmas.
Oh, and while we are at it; “why don’t shoppers check out their own goods (and save the stores’ even more profits) ?
‘CAUSE I DON’T WORK THERE, YAH MORON. Hire some locals to do your work.
One b*d*ss driveby cat!
Very sweet and kind of you.
No jobs are being taken away, all the major chains have cart corrals around the parking lot that the cart jockeys have to collect from and take them into the store.
Appreciate your concern tho.....LOL!
That’s not a study, it’s a survey.
The difference is a study actually takes a random sample. These samples are already pre-vetted by these cart narc YTers and represent the examples they thought would monetize their channel.
Also a study would involve some cross-section of people and there you would find data about which sort of people do and don’t return the cart, which is meaningful because it’s a microcosm of how people behave towards others generally, aka if they’re a part of a functioning society or not.
Your ‘behavioralscientist’ clearly doesn’t wish to observe that data nor its conclusions.
Lazy slobs. The men probably piss on the floor at home too. They don’t care.
Pardon?
I tend to park a ways out in the parking lot, right by a corral. It makes taking care of the cart easy and convenient.
Trolls gonna troll! You define yourself. 😆
DH will do that.
He likes things neat and easy for the cart person to collect and roll back in the store.
Using cart narcs for research is pretty stupid. That dude purposely goads and antagonizes people. The purpose isn’t to return carts or any such thing...but to get people angry so he has controversial content.
“I defined you”
You’re the “definer” like Bush was the “decider”. Two intellectual peas in a pod. 😆
Bingo! We have a winner!
Not really. It used to be a standard thing for a person to take your cart out to your car for you and help you load your groceries. Then some accountant figured out if you made customers take out their own groceries you didn't have to spend money on employees to do it. Then there was nobody to bring the carts in so they had to have employees designated to go out and gather up the carts from all over the parking lot. Then some accountant figured out they could at least concentrate the carts in one area by building cart corrals and then making customers feel like they were helping reduce cost by returning their carts to cart corrals. Once people caught on to that the changed the tactic to it was kind to return the cart to the cart corral. It became a moral issue. Bottom line is this is and was always a way for stores to save money by reducing employees they had to hire.
Until the conditioning of “Pay-carts”, it was considered normal to leave the carts near your parking spot. There used to be a couple of cart-boys whose job it was to patrol the lot and corral the carts to bring them back to the storefront.
The number of cart-boy positions was greatly reduced for cost savings, so they had to train the public to return the carts by using a monetary cost for failing to obey the store’s edict.
Kids need jobs, and this was just another chip away at the foundations of good work ethic.
YMMV, JMHO
This chart is pretty much exactly the type and ratio of responses I get when I confront people for trespassing in my private property as a shortcut to a public facility. I guess it's a universal set of excuses for deliberate bad behavior:
Justification: “But I live here!" (somewhere else in my neighborhood) or “This is the official path!” (Uh, no, it's not.)Anger/Aggression: “Shut up” / “Who the hell are you” (allows his/her dog to snarl / curses me or pushes me physically)
Silence: (continues trespassing to adjoining property)
Deflection: “I'm disabled” (but you're out walking around with no cane)
“Where is that posted?” (there are 3 no trespass signs)
“You have no right to insult me in front of my child” (her trespass role modeling is her right)
“I can see a path sign right over there” (back of an inapplicable sign 30 yards deep into the adjoining public property)Apology: (Approximately 3% of trespassers over the past 30 years.)
I do it for the exercise.
I do it for the exercise.
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