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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per the dictionary
they are a stupid, annoying, or detestable person.
you can figure out the word, it has 7 letters begins wirh and ends with a vowel. A&E
That would be the next good research topic for Hannah — “Which FR posts get the most replies and why?”
You are a stupid, annoying, or detestable person. I did call you that name, I defined you.
Thanks. I found a Uninell on Amazon with excellent reviews for less than $300.
It does seem like an extravagance; but my husband is, shall we say, a very EXUBERANT cook; and putting this down in the kitchen every night or so could be very worth it.
I return carts to the corral. Also, I’ve chased after and caught other people’s runaway carts right before they hit a car. Twice, the runaway carts were right in front of filled corrals, and witnesses wrongly assumed the carts were mine. I caught one cart within inches of a car. The people in the car got out, checked their car, and eyed me suspiciously. They didn’t thank me. I instantly regretted doing that good deed.
But the author makes too much fuss about returning carts. Far worse is what customers do to merchandise inside the stores. They drop things and leave them on the floor, rip open packages, throw clothing around, leave frozen stuff on a shelf, and on and on. I once worked in a clothing department. I would spend an hour straightening everything up, only for it to be destroyed quickly. Once, I saw one woman undo all my work within seconds.
It usually depends on the class of neighborhood.
Leave it to a sickologist to take something simple and turn it into something complex with a label (and thus treatable and most importantly billable.)
The usual category for such people is simply @$$hole.
I almost always return the cart.
The rare exception was an Albertsons that had nary a cart return corral, which was explained to me due to them supposedly having an employee who was supposed to take out the groceries and return the cart.
Well, they either didn’t hire the cart return guys or they were off goofing around.
I agree, Traders Joe’s shoppers tend to be more civilized and considerate not just in the parking lot but inside the store,too.
Let me play a little Devil’s Advocate here.
I’m 77 and in good health. Well, except for 2 back surgeries in 2021 and 2024 from a chopper that didn’t want to fly anymore back in the day, and bad ankles from two bad parachute jumps around that same time.
Most of my sense of balance disappeared with my two back surgeries, so I webble-wobble when I walk. I do have a walking stick I use when necessary (I refuse to call it a ‘cane.’).
So I really look forward to finding a space with a convenient ‘abandoned’ cart right beside it. A shopping cart becomes a ‘stealth’ walker for me, so I don’t want to have to leave it at a cart corral 10 spaces away, and then hobble back to the car.
Another example, you’ve got a mother with two young kids in her cart. So she’s supposed to get her kids into their car seats, and then leave them alone there, even with the car locked, while she shleps the cart 100 feet away to a corral and back?
No, she’s going to push the cart up to the space between the front of the cars and leave it there. Perfect for me to grab on my way into the store.
In the world of proliferating Olympic events, I train for the upcoming (so I hear) “Cart aiming” competition
Since I am too lazy to walk the cart to the corral, I aim the cart toward the corral opening and give a well controlled shove. I have to be ready to chase an errant cart is headed to a parked car, so some fast twitch fibers are needed . Extra points are given if the cart can insert itself into the back of a cart that is already in the corral. I calculate that the technique has saved me about 1,000 steps a year.
So far, no word from the Olympic competition committee.
I always return my cart, no matter the distance. Integrity is what you do when nobody is watching and few people hold themselves to a high standard.
I agree. And, many postings on this topic have been unexpected from this community.
And, it’s disappointing.
To learn everything you ever needed to know about shopping carts, see Bubbles, from Trailer Park Boys.
Yep, I had “Leave no trace” ingrained in my head since I was a kid.
Because they are lazy, period. If you can push it around the store and to your car, you can push it to the collection point. “It’s all about me” at its finest.
I remember “Dan’s Bake Sale”, that Rush Limbaugh did, and noted that afterwards, not one item of trash was left behind.
Compare and contrast with all those “Earth Day” concerts on the Washington Mall, where it took two days to pick up all the trash.
Except many of them walk through the parking lots, very oblivious to the cars jockeying for parking spaces. Nearly hit a few while backing out of my space.
Please don’t return carts from handicap parking spaces...yes, don’t. I need a cart there to use for a walker so I can get into the store. I always leave mine there against the post for the next person to use, and am grateful when someone left it for me.
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