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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I do too, and so does my wife who had a stroke last year and has trouble walking.
Why don’t some people “return” their welfare payments by getting a job? Let me know what you discover. I think there is a connection in thought pattern….
They don’t use the little hand carry carts any longer cuz people steal them.
How would you feel if someone else thought the same way that you do, didn’t find a spot close enough to a cart return, left their cart out....and it drifted across the parking lot and crashed into your vehicle?
Would you be understanding that it wasn’t actually the person’s fault who didn’t return their cart? Would it actually be the store’s fault or maybe the low IQ employee who didn’t collect the cart in time?
Not putting carts back is very low trust society, high time preference, third world behavior.
Put your carts back every time. If it’s too much trouble, then don’t use a cart at all. Just carry everything in your hands.
I’ll put them in corals in the parking lot. I ain’t deadheading an empty cart back. Especially in a crappy parking lot where you can hear an empty cart rolling from a mile away. And if there was a “cart narc” I’d push the cart AWAY from the store just to piss them off.
The funny thing is she’s already a PhD. It almost sounds like she could turn shopping carts into PhD thesis #2.
I’ll give you 10X points if you can unstuck two carts that are in a permanent coital lock.
Even more points if you can assure me that I don’t get the cart with the wobbly wheels or the stuck brake.
Not putting your cart in the corral is similar to refusing to queue up in a line and crowding to the front or burping or farting in public or talking on your phone on speaker or laying across several seats on a crowded bus or train.
It is low trust society / high time preference / 3rd world behavior.
People who act that way are low class a-holes.
....and it actually would be crime if the cart got lose and hit someone’s car.
Flagging someone with a gun isn’t a crime either but if you accidentally shoot them, it becomes a big problem.
Hahahahahahaha!!!!!
Two top excuses
1.Laziness
2.Fear of getting lost
Same with the auto-excerpt option.
Auto-excerpt in most case does not provide the most relevant information.
Often, the excerpt has no relation to the article headline.
One most go to the source link and that’s fine as long as that link to the complete article remains active and available.
Once that link is dead, all FR is left with is a useless excerpt.
I always appreciate it when someone takes the time to snip the most important pieces of the article in their excerpt, thereby allowing it to be continued to be a useful source of information as long as it remains on FR’s server.
“Yep, lazy. We usually end up grabbing a cart in the parking lot and rolling it into store when we shop.”
I do that too. I will tell someone unloading their cart that I can return that for you. I am walking that way anyway and it makes me feel good.
Why? The same reason they don’t do a lot of things, like taking care of themselves or knowing how to dress decently in public.
Because they are:
Lazy
Self-important
Entitled
Dependent
Worthless
Inconsiderate
Bitter at something or someone
Angry at something or someone
Worthless Clock Suckers who never learned any manners, had lousy parents or ones who don’t care to claim them now because they are disappointments
There are lots and lots of little things that uncover much bigger character failures in people. Abuse to animals and returning shopping carts are two of those failures.
Contra!
Maybe a little autistic or ocd.
Who needs Cart Karens, even if returning carts is the right thing to do?
Te wheels:
Lol!! I think that’s a universal thing…
I think there’s a “shopping cart gremlin” that goes around and destroys at least one wheel on every cart
I’ve heard said that, “Ethics is your behavior when nobody is looking.” I would add that simple consideration of your fellow men and women is what you do for others, even if it is a small thing with no expectation of reward or even a thanks. I live in a neighborhood where a dumpster serves 3 or four families. If you crush or dismantle boxes, you can extend the available space for the entire week. But. I have gone out the day after pickup and found an empty dishwasher size carton tossed in, upside down to occupy 90% of the dumptster for the rest of the week. That’s what inconsiderate behavior looks like. AND. No matter how many times I dismantle such boxes and stack them, the neighbors never seem to get the concept. I think the simple shopping cart study, a little, even trivial pursuit, tells a huge story about modern human behavior.
I think you could write a novel (even a nonfiction book) based on the character traits the cart study portrays. What is missing? I think I’d like to see what the study monitors would find if they ask those who returned the carts, “Why did you return that cart just now?”
I’d argue that heroism and villainy show themselves every day in the tiniest of ways. Whaddya think?
Now, if you asked me why I crush or fold mountains of empty cardboard boxes in our community dumpster, what would I say? For myself, I might need room for bags of leaves and trash when I rake and clean the garage later this week. So both pragmatic and selfish. Why do I crush those of my neighbors? I have to get along with people where I live. I can’t afford to express openly the hostility I feel. And maybe, just maybe, after 5 years with no effect on them, next year it will dawn on them to follow the example.
Oh, and I always return carts. No heroism. Just seems like the right thing to do. Or. Is it . . . I merely do not want to be one of the A-holes that don’t return carts?
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