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 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’ll grab carts to take into the store.?
So it’s YOU who removes the shopping carts from the Disabled Parking area making me stumble into the store to get one?
Cart-Karens cause me grief and anxiety. Without a cart to steady myself I know one day I will fall on my way into the store.
Like the kids using the electric carts as go-carts in the store draining the batteries. I’ve never had a working one which I didn’t have to leave in an aisle when it died.
Heartless
“I never return them because we live in a racist society and I am tired of being oppressed.”
— Michelle Obama
Parking lots are large and their aren't enough cart collection areas. These stores don't want to hire staff to collect them so they instead set up the lots without collection areas other than directly in front of the building.
"They pay people to do this" is not just and excuse and an attempt at Shifting Responsibility. Stores previously paid cart collectors. For some high school kids, it was part of one of a few jobs they could get. Not long ago, staff, or usually kids looking to earn spending money, would take your groceries to your car. I suspect the lawyers and the accountants nixed that.
I know one particular supermarket where there are no cart collection areas in the parking lot and the one in front of the supermarket is uphill on a significant slope. You could see where customers started pushing their cart back uphill but then gave up. Old people in particular had difficulty with that one.
The cart collection area is full because customers didn't have the strength to push their carts to fold them into the others. Or, annoyingly, the supermarket uses two or three different cart styles that don't fold into each other. Why roll your cart to an overfilled collection area that has carts lined up out the back and blocking the flow of cars in the lot?
The cart collection area is already in use:
No I do it, too. Random acts of kindness daily.
My observation is that shoppers at Trader Joe’s are very good at returning shopping carts. Walmart shoppers tend to be lazy about that.
Actually I like this study in that it at least attempts to ask the subjects why they did what they did and documented it. IMO, far too many psychology experiments do this.
It is not clear to me that the categories presented help answer the research question: “Why don’t people return their shopping carts?” Many of the categories could be coded “how the subject avoided answering a question”.
BINGO! Now you deserve the thousands of dollars in research and time wasted by these people on a simple reason. If you are not taught to be courteous and society doesn’t reinforce that virtue it will not manifest itself magically.
“My complaint is that they never have cart return stations near the handicapped parking spaces.”
It’s a feature, not a fault. Ppl with mobility issues need a cart when they get out of their car to assist balance and walking. Please don’t return carts from handicap parking spaces.
Not weird, maybe just OCD. I dated a young lady like that in college. She was an English Lit major. If you looked in her desk or backpack, her pens and highlighters were always sorted in ROYGBIV order. When we'd eat together, either in the college DFAC, or in a restaurant on a date, she would always eat the items on her plate in clockwise order.
Establishing and enforcing dress codes gave us a society where everyone wore costumes, hiding their true selves. It was a holdover of the Victorian facade.
I for one appreciate having people show me right up front who they think they are.
Obviously.
I wish this psychologist would test FReepers too lazy or entitled to mash ‘Preview’ before posting. For those too self important to show this courtesy to readers, ‘Preview’ includes spellcheck with a red squiggly line underneath misspelled words. I’d bet there would be a high correlation with the shopping cart offenders.
Why spend that extra time and effort returning the cart when you could hurry back to your car and start browsing your phone again(after that painful pause when you had to....shop ) while two other vehicles wait in the hopes you will exit the parking spot.
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