I have seen many vehicles damaged by shopping carts, including mine.
I think that self-centeredness is the basic and biggest issue.
It’s a pet peeve of mine. I’ll grab carts to take into the store. Aldis has the quarter deposit thing going on and that helps a lot.
I always return the shopping cart to the collection area. It’s called being courteous.
Very long article justifying taking jobs away from low income ppl during the holidays.
What’s their next target, the store greeters?
It’s like tossing an empty beer can onto somebody’s lawn because you know they’ll pick it up in the morning, regardless of whether or not it’s worth 5 or 10 cents as a returnable.
i’ve never seen loose shopping carts outside an Aldi. Apparently even a quarter is more important to people than good manners...
Aldi’s solved that problem with a 25 cent charge that is refunded when you return the cart.
I'm with the writer. The failure to return a cart is an expression of self-importance, laziness and utter lack of respect for the store employees who have to wrangle the carts and to other customers whose vehicles the stray carts may damage.
It's not a huge ordeal to return a cart, and if you're smart, when you're looking to park, just look for a space near a cart return, knowing you'll be inevitably using one once you've loaded your groceries into your vehicle.
My complaint is that they never have cart return stations near the handicapped parking spaces.
I always return mine to the corral. Even if it’s raining.
It’s a small thing.
But simple actions like abandoning your cart randomly says a great deal about an individual.
It’s often said, character is demonstrated by what you do when no one is watching.
Some months back my local Wally World removed all of the farthest-out cart racks from their mammoth parking lot. The rate of cart abandonment sky-rocketed, with carts drifting all over the far reaches of the lot. Then a couple of weeks ago they relented and replaced the rural cart racks. Abandonments went way down. There have to be enough cart racks that customers don’t have to hike a quarter-mile to do the right thing. There must be some sort of sweet spot. Perhaps that could be the author’s next research project. He could even apply for a grant from a big-box store.
I worked as an assistant manager for a drug store in my younger days. Our store was in a poor neighborhood and once a week we’d go out with a truck and drive through the neighborhood and pick up abandoned shopping carts. In one year we lost about 50 carts.
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.
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?
My wife teaches me simple obvious things. One of those is to park nearest the cart return not nearest to the store.
I’d think that cart-narking would suffer from a very poor risk/benefit quotient.
I think most people who don’t return their carts do so because they don’t see how the action benefits them in that moment. Seeing other carts left in the open only reinforces that. It’s a form of selfishness and disregard for societal norms. Look how many folks wear pajamas to the store or flip flops to sit-down restaurants. Establishing and enforcing dress codes would do wonders once they see they can’t get on a plane or be seated for a meal.
“I never return them because we live in a racist society and I am tired of being oppressed.”
— Michelle Obama