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
It’s like tossing an empty beer can onto somebody’s lawn...
Actually, I’d disagree with that. I don’t see the similarity. And I have a quarter mile of frontage on my property. I DO have to pick up people’s beer cans. But I didn’t sell them the beer. They and I did not exchange services, products, or money. They were simply littering.
I’m able to loop all the plastic bags onto my arm and lug stuff out that way, leaving the other hand free for keys. Only occasionally using carts, which I would dutifully returned.
But that process evaporated along with my generosity when eco-nazis started charging for bags. Now IDGAF, though I won’t leave a cart in an unsecured, rollable, position, nor let it block a parking spot.
Same. Some garbage of a person left one that came a scatching all along my vehicle. Walking pieces of garbage. Probably some lady in pajamas or a grown assed man dressed like a toddler.
They should make them work like a Roomba, they will automatically home in on the cart rack.
On second thought, it never works for my Roomba, though, it always ends up stopped under the part of my bed where I can’t reach it.
I’ll not only return my cart, but I’ll also reorganize the carts in the return corral so that the smaller carts are on one side and the larger ones on the other. Does that make me weird?
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I do that too. I also wipe the counter in front of the sink I used at the airport bathroom when I am done drying my hands. I am not a pig and I believe in leaving a place better than how I found it.
I often skim articles and replies quickly. At first, I thought you wrote “I like tossing an empty beer can onto somebody’s lawn...” and then “Here’s a whole new research area for Hannah.”
Excellent post. Thank you.
If the store is closer than the cart corral, I walk the cart into the store.
Someone got mad at me for not returning a cart. I had a broken toe. I barely made it into the store and then used the cart to help me walk. It was really painful when I got to my car, and the place to put the carts was a good walk. I safely put it in the empty stall next to mine.
This woman gets out of her car and yells at me.
I then just said, that I have a broken toe and would appreciate it if she could put it away for me.
She did not put it away.
🤣
I think my method is most efficient. Just bring a cart in with you. Or two...
Heck, I did that when we went to costco a few days ago.
Many people leave the motorized handicap carts in the area around the handicap parking. This makes it much easier for handicapped people.
Back in the day, nobody returned their shopping carts. The norm of returning carts emerged in the 1980s.
Today, if there’s ample space in the parking lot, I leave it near my car.
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That’s a total misconception. Returning shopping carts has always been a thing.
Back in the day, nobody returned their shopping carts.
And threw litter all over the place.
Say what you will about that “Crying Indian” ad in the 1970s, it worked.
Aldi grocery stores have you deposit a quarter to get a cart and then will return the quarter when you return a cart. It is all done by a mechianical machine.
Roomba’s are Great CAT Toys!
Back when I lived in Florida, I used a laundromat down there that is owned by a retire couple. The husband, formerly an airline mechanic, would tell me that successful people returned their shopping cars, while unsuccessful people left them abandoned. That’s a general rule, of course, with exceptions on both sides, as far as I can tell.
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I believe that. Successful people also make their beds. Live in neat houses. Don’t hoard.
I live in walking distance to my supermarket and often gather shopping carts and wheel them to designated parking spots. I think the answer is laziness/entitlement just like the selfish SOBs who DON’T PICK UP THEIR DOG POOP after it poops in public areas.
It’s nothing more than that. They can’t/won’t perform a common courtesy because it’s so easy not to.
The handicapped spots are the closest to the store anyways. Sometimes if I’m fortunate enough to get a regular spot near the store, the store is closer to the car than the cart corral so it goes back there.
Honestly for the handicapped spots, since they all have those generous loading zones, a cart could easily be left there for the next person.
But seriously, handicapped people don’t have canes or walkers? What do they do when they have to go somewhere and there are no shopping carts to hang onto?
I resemble that remark.
Preach it.
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