Why don't people return their shopping carts?

https://behavioralscientist.org/why-dont-people-return-their-shopping-carts-a-somewhat-scientific-investigation/

by ohjeez • 8 months ago

144 409 8 months ago

latchkey• 8 months ago

I don't even think about it. If available, I take it from near where I park and I return it to the front of the store with the rest of the carts. The little tiny bit of extra exercise is nice to clear my head before I start driving.

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

When it becomes a habit, good deeds become effortless. I wish I could say that about most people.

hpdigidrifter• 8 months ago

I assume it's generally unbecoming to reference 4chan posts for an academic but surprised the Shopping Cart theory didn't get a mention given how close it was to the subject matter.

“The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing. To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore, the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it.”
“No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you, or kill you for not returning the shopping cart. You gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct. The Shopping Cart Theory, therefore, is a great litmus test on whether a person is a good or bad member of society.”

GenerocUsername2• 8 months ago

I live by this. It is one of the least controversial 4chan takes.

There is nothing wrong with citing 4chans shopping cart theory.

It is truly a marker of good vs bad people as far as it comes to participating in a high trust society.

hackthemack2• 8 months ago

I worked at a grocery store for a while in my teens and early twenties. It is really a surprise to me that this has become an internet topic and even more surprising how strongly people feel like it is a litmus test for good vs bad. I just do not think it is a good litmus test. People are busy, some people have kids. Who is really being inconvenienced?

One thing I want to point out is that everyone I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts. The employees saw it as a mini-break from the drudgery of the day.

From having to go get carts many times, I will say, that if someone leaves their cart in a parking spot... well that is bad behavior. But if they just push it into the grass, or out of the way, who cares if it is tucked away there, or tucked away at cart corral. Someone has to go out and get the carts anyway, and it broke up the day, got you outside.

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

It's derived from the "how do you treat the waiter" test in first dates, so it's not like this came from nowhere. Your small actions where "it doesn't matter" can have surprising revelations on your overall disposition in life. e.g., if you're reaction to being asked about a shopping cart is violence, that says a lot about how you treat many confrontations in your life.

JohnBooty8• 8 months ago

    It is truly a marker of good vs bad people as 
    far as it comes to participating in a high trust 
    society.

Here's an even better test, if you ask me.

Do you ever grab one of those "stranded" shopping carts on the way in to the store?

A lot of societal issues can't be cured merely by doing the right thing ourselves. Littering can't be solved merely by not littering - somebody has to pick up litter. (A lot of litter is the result of wind blowing over trashcans and such, so even in a society where nobody intentionally litters, there will be litter)

Murder can't be solved merely by not murdering people - if you witness a murder, you need to do something about it, not just think "well, at least I don't murder people" and continue with your day.

Shopping cart logistics are obviously many orders of magnitude less serious than murder, but I think it's a similar class of problem/solution.

ranger_danger• 8 months ago

It sounds like a good test in theory but I would say it's actually more nuanced than that.

In my experience, there are certainly reasons that returning the cart might be difficult or impossible (handicap, small children etc.).

If you speak to employees about it, I have been told that they often actually like going outside to get the carts, so to me this is not only increased convenience for me personally, but desired by the employees also as they get a "break" from the chaos inside the store.

stronglikedan2• 8 months ago

if you speak to employees about it, I have been told that they often actually like going outside to get the carts

This has been my experience as well, but people will always blindly insist the opposite just to "win" the shopping cart argument.

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

I have been told that they often actually like going outside to get the carts

They are getting the carts either way. No one is saying to return all carts to the store. There are several partking lot racks for a reason.

Jordan-117• 8 months ago

I've worked retail jobs where employees were assigned lot duty on a rotating basis, and I can assure you most people didn't want to do it and staff had to be vigilant to make sure it wasn't being neglected. It's moderately hard physical labor (assuming there are no powered cart-pusher things and the lot is large and on some kind of slope), and is out in the elements where it can be frigidly cold and windy or swelteringly hot. Some employees might be misanthropic enough in context that they'd rather do it than work inside, but it's definitely not all or even a majority in my experience.

mvdtnz• 8 months ago

there are certainly reasons that returning the cart might be difficult or impossible (handicap, small children etc.).

If you can get the cart around the store, across the parking lot and to your car, you can get it back to its home too. It didn't teleport to your car.

abetusk• 8 months ago

Interesting theory.

Here's my counter theory: People's moral righteousness on whether they think a person can be judged by a morally neutral and inconsequential action sheds light on their true moral character. Especially so if the judged action is insignificant but socially frowned on.

I know this is all in half-jest but the article and discussion seem pretty mean-spirited to me.

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

People's moral righteousness on whether they think a person can be judged by a morally neutral and inconsequential action sheds light on their true moral character.

You call it moral righteousness. I call it emotional intelligence. You realize as you grow up that your small actions shape and reflect your larger self. And you can see it in others too.

We call it "work ethic" in white collar jobs, and I'm sure you wouldn't defend someone who's otherwise an excellent programmer submitting sloppy reports, having inconsistent time estimates, or simply making snarky PR's. It's a shame we don't value it when it's not about maximizing shareholder value.

cedws• 8 months ago

My completely unqualified opinion is that this kind of behaviour is linked directly to intellectual ability. Returning the cart requires self-discipline but also implies a thought process around upholding and creating social order. Even fear of shame implies a desire to uphold social standing with others.

Whereas not returning the cart can only be explained in two ways: a thought process that says ‘not my problem’ (selfish, disorderly, bad for society) or no thought process at all, like an animal with no higher order thinking.

eesmith6• 8 months ago

I strongly doubt it is related to intellectual ability but cultural expectations.

Some years back someone did a study about which country's US diplomats at the UN had the highest number of NYC parking tickets. Diplomats don't need to pay parking fines due to immunity. This is very similar to returning shopping carts.

As I recall, it was clearly correlated with country, which in turn was connected to national corruption rates. Ahh, here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12312/w123...

Overall, the basic pattern accords reasonably well with common perceptions of corruption across countries. The worst parking violators – the ten worst are Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria, Mozambique, Albania, Angola, Senegal, and Pakistan – all rank poorly in cross-country corruption rankings. While many of the countries with zero violations accord well with intuition (e.g., the Scandinavian countries, Canada), there are a number of surprises. Some of these are countries with very small missions (e.g., Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic), and a few others have high rates of parking violations but do pay the fines (these are Bahrain, Malaysia, Oman, and Turkey; we return to this issue below).

I've read far too many stories of people who don't clean up after themselves at a store or restaurant, justified by "no need - they pay someone to do this" or even "it's a good thing I do this otherwise you wouldn't have a job" to know it's simply intellectual ability.

lm284692• 8 months ago

A lot of it has to be education too, for exemple in some cultures the outside, ie outside your own place, is seen as more or less a giant trash, so people see no problem dumping their shit even right in front of their own building. In my culture the outside is seen as a common shared place and definitely not a trash, I remember my grandpa telling me not to spit on the ground or to pick up my candy wrappers when I was maybe 4 or 5 years old.

For me it was an objective truth until I moved to a more culturally diverse city, these people are no dumber than I but they simply do not understand my pov

estimator7292• 8 months ago

I tend to reduce this even further: you as a person are either fundamentally capable of considering (and caring about) how your actions affect others, or you aren't.

You can draw a pretty clear line across about half of america with this standard. It's depressing.

carlmr• 8 months ago

like an animal with no higher order thinking.

In Germany I see far fewer abandoned shopping carts than in America.

kgwxd4• 8 months ago

The worst offender is the kind of person that doesn't put it back specifically because they know about this theory. "Don't tread on me!"

hat_monger• 8 months ago

Luckily these sorts tend to be so clownish they keep themselves out of power

xtiansimon• 8 months ago

Are people who return shopping carts also predisposed* to be _good drivers_?

* Not considering physical limitations.

oliwarner• 8 months ago

For an idea about society, that is an incredibly isolated lens on the problem.

You gain something if others put their trolleys away. You gain something [fuzzy] knowing you may have helped others. We have these mechanisms of cooperation that some people eschew, that some demand, and coin-release trolleys are the response to what happens when it breaks down.

Coincidentally a supermarket near me has recently converted their trolley stock to coin-release. I have three children and increasingly few Pound coins so a result of this is I shop less, and far less impulsively. Good job, Tesco.

bradlys• 8 months ago

This depends too much. It’s standard at many stores to have someone who goes out and fetches all the carts. They have to do this anyway because of the cart corrals. This sounds like some idea by a European in some tiny parking lot without those.

People here have mentioned it only taking 30-60 seconds, which definitely speaks to European centric stuff. A lot of the places I’ve shopped where I’m using a cart, it takes minutes to return. That’s why people aren’t doing it. You spend 1-2 minutes walking to your car. That’s why they leave the cart, it’s an extra 5 minutes round trip. But for an employee who is going to be going around the lot anyway to do this job, it’s no extra added time.

This also ignores that people like me will sometimes pickup a cart like this on the way to store if it’s convenient. We also don’t leave them in parking spaces or whatever. We leave them somewhere reasonable.

dioxis• 8 months ago

You forgot to add: "A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it."

sharts• 8 months ago

There cited reasons for not returning carts is often job creation / security.

Leaving carts means someone must retrieve.

noman-land• 8 months ago

There is a third position I've come across, which is also used to justify littering. It's the "they hire people to do this so I don't have to". Sometimes combined with "if I returned my cart/didn't litter those people wouldn't have a job".

Tostino• 8 months ago

I'd lump them in with the "bad" members of society group in a heartbeat.

bluedino9• 8 months ago

I already checked out my own groceries. I'll just leave it in the parking lot for someone who works at the store to retrieve it.

The real problem is the people who take them 3 blocks away and don't return them. More stores are using those wheels that lock up using various technologies when they are taken outside of the store property.

ahmeneeroe-v2• 8 months ago

I'm with 4chan on this one. The actual problem is people like you.

marcellus23• 8 months ago

I'll just leave it in the parking lot

Do you mean leave it in one of the designated areas? Or are you just leaving shopping carts in the middle of the parking lot?

alkonaut• 8 months ago

No the problem is people who leave them in thr parking. Unless you return it you’re making everyone else pay for returning _your_ cart. Plus of course making the parking harder to use in the meantime.

Just return the cart.

472828472• 8 months ago

You could say you create a paid job by not returning your cart. The downsides I see is that free wheeling carts can cause accidents (eg during wind) and create annoyances such as blocking parking spaces. We could probably find some more arguments on both sides. Personally, I consider the downsides to outweigh the pros, which is why I consider it to be the right thing to return it.

bluedino9• 8 months ago

On the other hand, it can be convenient to grab a loose cart that's near your parking space, instead of having to un-jam a cart from the 50 that are stacked inside each other at the front of the store.

abdullahkhalids2• 8 months ago

I have gone ice skating a lot in the past. Many people rent the skates from the establishment. I don't think I have ever seen anyone, after skating, just leave their rented shoes by the lockers/benches when the switch back to their own shoes. They always return the rented shoes to the desk, even when there is a short lineup at rush hour.

It's very strange that people think the same courtesy should not be extended to shopping carts.

bluedino9• 8 months ago

You don't rent the cart. What if you had to clean your own table at Applebees?

mindslight4• 8 months ago

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?

FWIW, the cart itself can serve as a mobility aid for some types of disabilities. So the hard part might be walking back alone from returning the cart, and that person might view abandoned carts next to open parking spots as a good thing for where they themselves want to park to minimize the cartless walking. I'm certainly not trying to justify the overall trend, just talking about this one particular example.

rvba2• 8 months ago

Do you make those arguments in good faith?

If someone has vertigo that does not allow them to push a cart for few meters, then maybe this same vertigo means they shouldnt drive a car at all.

Because they can cause an accident and kill themselves, or others.

mindslight4• 8 months ago

idk about vertigo specifically (and things laypeople diagnose as vertigo), but yes in that I had a family member who was exactly in this situation. Walking sticks and still very concerned with falling while getting to a cart, then perfectly stable after being able to grab onto something in front of them. Though I highly doubt they themselves left carts around the lot rather than returning them to the closest corral.

murderfs• 8 months ago

How did she get into the supermarket in the first place?

mindslight4• 8 months ago

Driving? Plenty of people have personal mobility issues while driving just fine once they're in a car. Have you ever given away used home health aid items on craigslist? It can be a pretty sad scene.

waffletower5• 8 months ago

Surprised that safety wasn't a statistically significant reason. Pushing your cart to a return exposes one to more parking lot traffic as a vulnerable pedestrian -- particularly worrisome for the elderly. It minimizes risk to leave the cart near your vehicle. Perhaps I have a really solid rationalization at work here :D

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

Wouldn't make too much sense because cart kiosks are typically no more than 4-5 parking spaces over. The marginal risk compared to getting to your care are basically nil.

171862744019• 8 months ago

Pushing your cart to a return exposes one to more parking lot traffic as a vulnerable pedestrian

The amount of car traffic you are exposed as a pedestrian is way larger, that the few minutes in a parking lot are a rounding error. Also on a parking lot, there are a lot of pedestrians, so car drivers will drive even more carefully then on any random street, where pedestrians can also walk around at any time.

hackingonempty• 8 months ago

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.

CartNarc videos are selected for the reaction of the subject. Many videos where the subject just returned their cart or didn't get sufficiently agitated end up on the cutting room floor. It isn't a representative sample, there is heavy selection bias. No conclusions can be drawn from them despite the attempts of the author.

It isn't even "somewhat" scientific as the author states.

itopaloglu83• 8 months ago

I have my study with the sample of one as well.

At Kroger, they have these shopping carts that locks their wheels if they were to be taken too far from the store. Well, sometimes they just lock without any reason, so what does the person do as they grab one as they're entering the store an it's locked? They just leave it there, and pull the next one.

And over time, the Kroger entrance is just full of shopping carts that are locked and every customer that comes in gets agitated because all the initial carts they interact with are locked.

miggol2• 8 months ago

Do people not return carts in your country? I enjoy Cart Narcs but they would have a hard time making content in The Netherlands.

We do have small parking lots here, and many carts have a coin deposit mechanism. It's not just that we're a morally superior people.

bluGill3• 8 months ago

The vast majority do return carts in my country. But when you have 100 customers an hour (which isn't much) and 5% don't return carts that is 5 carts per hour - odds are you will always see a couple carts out of place. The numbers above are made up of course, but the point remains that a small minority makes everyone look bad.

Only one store near me has a coin deposit: Aldi which has European roots - it has probably never occurred to them to check if the cost of the coin collectors is worth it (I'm sure it adds $5 to the cost of a $300 cart). Every other store finds people return their carts often enough that it isn't worth the bother to put those in place.

miggol2• 8 months ago

And what country is that? If you're comfortable sharing.

Of course the coin thing somewhat relies on coins of mentionable value being in common circulation, which rules out the US from the start.

Here few people still carry coins since contactless, but most still have a fake euro coin somewhere on their keyring or in their car for shopping carts.

They hand out these fake coins, which are usually branded with the supermarket's logo, for free inside the shop. But the system still works because having to go inside for a new coin negates the saved effort of not bringing back the cart. And there's probably some feeling of discomfort associated with abandoning the cart with your coin still in it.

kevinsync2• 8 months ago

Parallel but unrelated, you can play these tones [0] to unlock shopping cart wheels that have locked up on you. The literal only times I ever abandon a cart (not return it to the store or cart corral) is when they lock up and I can't move the god damned things -- and the rare times it has happened have been in the middle of aisles where cars are supposed to drive, FULLY LOADED CART, before I ever get to the car to unload.

[0] https://www.begaydocrime.com

andy99• 8 months ago

Seems early posters are blaming the customers, but at least in Canada the grocery stores treat their customers with so much disdain that i see no problem with people leaving their cart wherever, if it can make more trouble for loblaws et al. Framing helping out a hostile oligopoly as “doing the right thing” is nonsense.

For the record I generally bring back my cart, but I’d stand behind someone who wanted to hurl it into the middle of the lot, at least at one of the grocery oligarchs.

bluedino9• 8 months ago

I'm honestly surprised stores don't make you enter your email address, phone number, or shoppers card to use the cart.

tavavex6• 8 months ago

If you want to cause trouble for Loblaws, don't shop at Loblaws and other chains of theirs. Willingly giving them your money, and then performatively "retaliating" by making the life of the minimum-wage employee (who would be here either way) slightly harder is completely useless as a form of protest. This feels like a rationalization for not taking the cart back by trying to hand-wave it to some large systematic actors. But the whole point is that the shopping cart choice is always a hyper-local choice. It's only about you, other customers and the people working at the store, not some distant megacorporation.

id003• 8 months ago

I'm returning my cart not because of my support of grocery stores but because I care about other customers: abandoned carts getting in the way of walking/parking, may damage cars and just in general clutter the space

helterskelter• 8 months ago

I never return my carts. I used to bag groceries in a grocery store and whenever I got sick of customers and/or coworkers I'd go get the carts. The more carts far out in the parking lot the better, I could an entire shift without being inside talking to customers.

theoldgreybeard2• 8 months ago

My dad never returns carts. He also worked at a grocery store when he was young and had the same mentality as this. He also said that he is "creating work" for these young kids and it's good for them ha.

Personally, I return carts - because when I worked in a service job, I always had more "important" things to do than clean up after slob customers.

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

Justifying laziness as a mean to maximize menial work really shows the little ways society has slipped off.

al_borland8• 8 months ago

I liked getting carts too, but I return mine, because no one else I worked with liked doing it. I’m not going to force someone to do work they might not want to do. I don’t know them, and statistically (from my n of probably 50), most people don’t want to do it… especially in the winter.

Most of the time I will leave my cart inside and carry my bags to the car. I use the small carts and they run out a lot, so I like to leave it there for other people who like the small carts.

russdill4• 8 months ago

I return carts, but I too worked at a grocery store and so did a fair amount of cart wrangling, a lot of it during the Phoenix summer. It was very zen, watching the monsoons build. Certainly didn't mind it.

Stores in the US provide a lot of services to shoppers; bagging groceries, taking them out to your car for you, etc. I don't see why collecting your cart can't be part of that. The exception here is stores like dollar tree, where employees are treated like absolute trash by corporate.

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

I don't see why collecting your cart can't be part of that.

The tech equivalent of this is "registers and RAM are so fast, why can't the Har drive just be all RAM?"

Baging groceries is centralized in a specific spot. Taking groceries out is a rare task you can expend a few employees for. Having people dedicated to collecting every single cart in real time is expensive. At that point it's easier to designate a garbage collection time and make laps around the property .

russellbeattie• 8 months ago

I'm now completely torn! I always return carts just out of habit as a nice thing to do, but I totally see this as a legitimate reason not to return them! I never worked at a grocery, but I have worked at other jobs where there was that one task that got you out of sight of management so you could take your time and mentally relax for a while. Taking the trash to the dumpster way out back, restocking the walk-in fridge from the basement, etc. It was less about not working, as it was about the freedom.

Then again, they still have to go out to the cart return areas to collect them which takes time, so in that sense leaving carts around just makes their job a bit harder. Hmm. Not sure now!

bombcar18• 8 months ago

Leave the carts wherever you will and pull the fire alarm as you leave; free break for everyone!

I assume the issue is apparent.

cush3• 8 months ago

Okay but stray carts block parking spaces, reduce accessibility, and damage cars when they roll around.

stronglikedan2• 8 months ago

now you're moving the goalpost. the vast majority of folks that don't return them leave them out of the way

bitwize3• 8 months ago

You're onto something. It's an almost perfect autistic/introvert "slap on some headphones and do something to feel productive without having to engage with humans" task.

But most people hate it, so my wife and I try to show consideration.

kgwxd4• 8 months ago

These days, there's like 1 kid working an entire grocery store, I don't think they'd love coming back in to an angry crowd of waiting customers.

buggymcbugfix7• 8 months ago

Is this a US phenomenon? Here in Germany, people always return their shopping carts. Yes, the carts take a coin as a deposit, which can be removed when the cart is returned, but many people have shopping cart openers (for want of a better word) on their keyrings, that circumvent the deposit, yet I haven't EVER seen anyone leaving their shopping cart. I'd go so far as to say that'd be even less socially adequate than urinating in public.

I've been around Europe a fair bit and from Bulgaria to Portugal, people just return their carts. It's a no-brainer.

trgn3• 8 months ago

you just explained it, they're not coin operated.

bluedino9• 8 months ago

At ALDI stores they are!

dirkt• 8 months ago

I am old enough to have lived in Germany when they were not coin operated, and most carts were returned at that time as well.

Though occasionally you saw a cart far far away from a supermarket, where someone had basically stolen it, either teenagers to have fun, or someone asocial who, I don't know, used to carry all the shopping home? I don't really know what they did with it.

And it was the cost of replacing those stolen carts that drove the adaption of the coin operation system. Not that people just left them in the parking lot. Some supermarkets also tried a system where the cart locked if you moved it out of range of some radio in the supermarket, but that one really didn't take off.

(Also, quite a few people in Germany just do shopping by walking or biking to the supermarket).

gcbirzan4• 8 months ago

If it's on their keychain, do you really think they'd leave their keychain there?

jq-r• 8 months ago

The "coin" part is usually detachable, so no need to leave the whole set of keys with the cart during shopping.

buggymcbugfix7• 8 months ago

Haha I was wondering if this part was unclear but assumed it was obvious from context, that the cart opener can be removed from the coin slit. Imagine leaving your keyring on your cart... yikes!

simlan• 8 months ago

Good point. Think of the device as a lock pick for Aldi carts you can remove it and don't need to leave your keychain.

iamnothere6• 8 months ago

Aldi is the only place in the US that I know of that uses this system. It works well enough, no carts in the lot, and surprisingly people sometimes leave a quarter in the cart as a sort of “pay it forward” minor charity. (Good because not everyone keeps change these days.)

buggymcbugfix7• 8 months ago

Naww, that is very sweet!

Doxin• 8 months ago

I can't say for the US, but over here the coin system is ubiquitous, and if you've not got a coin you can ask at the service desk and they'll hand you a branded coin to use.

tguedes2• 8 months ago

The only downside of this in the US is that homeless people will tend to hang around Aldi's asking people if they can return their cart to get the coin. Most of them are friendly and thankful but every once in awhile an aggressive person would make me very uncomfortable.

I also expect Aldi management isn't thrilled about homeless people camping outside their stores.

kalx2• 8 months ago

People here too return them. It is a social class question.

buggymcbugfix7• 8 months ago

Here, US?

arwhatever2• 8 months ago

The difference between the ratio of people returning their carts at Wal-mart vs at the Natural Foods store where I live is substantial.

PLMUV9A4UP27D• 8 months ago

Greetings from Finland. No deposit required for the carts, yet almost all carts are being returned (I can't remember when I last saw one not returned).

HeinzStuckeIt• 8 months ago

Wherever you are in Finland is more considerate than wherever I am in in Finland. Often when I arrive at my local Prisma there’s an employee outside wrangling abandoned carts.

veeti• 8 months ago

It happens: https://www.is.fi/hs-vantaa/art-2000006387011.html

You have to read between the lines on why that is so.

buggymcbugfix7• 8 months ago

PS: This is not meant as snark, but rather an observation, that by means of a small nudge (in this case the coin deposit), people can learn to do the Right Thing. To quote Charlie Munger:

Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

bombcar18• 8 months ago

I always thought it a sneaky way to pay children .25 cents a cart return.

An enterprising 10 year old could rack a few bucks sometimes.

brettgriffin7• 8 months ago

Why do the stores have the coin deposit if leaving the shopping cart, even if you circumvented the deposit, is morally more morally reprehensible than urinating in public?

Is this a US phenomenon

Yeah, you can kind of do whatever you want here. It's sort of our thing

mhb2• 8 months ago

It's sort of our thing

Also it seems to be our thing to have an unbounded number of assholes who do stuff like throw rental scooters in rivers.

tclover2• 8 months ago

You’re living in some different Germany. In the Germany where I’m living shopping carts are everywhere… (nrw)

NekkoDroid• 8 months ago

In my part of Germany (BW) I also almost never see carts outside of roughtly where they should be. Sometimes they are just lazily pushed under the enclosure (if you want to call it that), but most of the times they are just how they should be.

tclover2• 8 months ago

Took this picture close to the place where I’m living, people just come home with the cart and then drop it outside. This is Germany https://ibb.co/rGXfb0PY

buggymcbugfix7• 8 months ago

Whoa!

bombcar18• 8 months ago

This is the true chaotic neutral option and you see it anywhere that walking is common AND the carts don’t lockup their wheels at the lot line.

However, shopping carts SuCk on anything but smooth cement.

snovymgodym• 8 months ago

Yeah, looks like NRW alright

ninkendo• 8 months ago

Is this a US phenomenon?

The answer to this question is always “no”. Regardless of the subject. Basically 100% of the time.

At my local grocery store everyone returns their carts. In the other place in the US I lived 10 years ago, there were loose carts everywhere.

The US is a very, very big country. Really more like 50 big countries. With huge variation in culture, income, background, etc. There’s barely anything you can say that applies to the whole country, regardless of the subject.

binary1325• 8 months ago

someone clever ought to do some kind of statistical analysis and figure out what hidden variables are causing these differences.

gverrilla3• 8 months ago

It was never said that it was a phenomenon on the whole country.

It is a US phenomenom yes. When it exists in other countries it's because of Hollywood exporting american culture.

linehedonist• 8 months ago

What about Gittertiere? https://www.reddit.com/r/Gittertiere/s/KIDj4EhElD

buggymcbugfix7• 8 months ago

Of course hooligans steal shopping carts. This was about people leaving shopping carts in the parking lot :)

whazor• 8 months ago

Recently in NL many supermarkets have dropped the coin completely. But people have been conditioned for years to return the cart. Though there are cart thieves.

171862744019• 8 months ago

Same in Germany, it started during Corona, as people should touch things as less as possible.

graemep• 8 months ago

In the UK some places have it, some do not. Lidl does need the coin, Waitrose does not but has a system that stops you taking them out beyond the car park (there are warnings on, other supermarkets do not.

Almost everyone returns them in all the supermarkets in my area.

trashface• 8 months ago

My elderly mom never shops at Aldi (in the US) because she can't figure out the coin thing. Given that she spends outrageous amounts on groceries, Aldi is losing a ton of money by paywalling the stupid cart.

rvba2• 8 months ago

It would be useful if the author tried to classify by age. Would be nice to see if this is a boomer problem, or a general problem.

sparrish• 8 months ago

People can push the full cart 2 miles all around inside Costco but not an extra 30 feet to return an empty cart to a cart corral? There's no reason for it. It's one of the best indicators of narcissistic individuals - the other is treating restaurant servers poorly.

bluedino9• 8 months ago

The stores literally have people who are paid to collect the carts.

nlawalker• 8 months ago

From the cart corrals. Do you leave trash on the ground because they have people paid to empty the trash cans?

waffletower5• 8 months ago

You mention Costco as an example and claim that the return is (on average?) 30 feet away from your vehicle? Did you mean meters? Either way quite an underestimation. At our local meglo market (owned by Kroger) there isn't a return for every parking aisle. The distance and exposure to traffic to use a return is quite variable and can be significant. My local store is large enough that they have a cart returner as a dedicated position.

iamnothere6• 8 months ago

“But you see, restaurant servers understand that a certain percentage of customers will treat them poorly, and yet they choose to work the job anyway. In effect, it is priced in to their wage. In fact, by treating them even worse, I may actually make their wage go up by increasing the wage demanded!” —some HN commenter, probably

lakkal• 8 months ago

I always return my cart to a collection kiosk thing out in the parking lot, or to where the carts are lined up at the store entrance if that's closer. I don't recall when this became a thing, though. Back in the early-mid 1980s as a teenager my first job involved going out into the lot at K-Mart and bringing in all the carts.

lvl155• 8 months ago

People in this country can’t even bother to put their carts back and you think they’re not going to get replaced by AI?

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

Well, AI would take a long time to properly corral all shopping carts back to the store. Much easier to have it product slop and replace passionate underpaid creators.

baggy_trough2• 8 months ago

For me it depends on the store. A normal grocery store: I will always return the cart. A luxury store: I don't, I consider it part of the service that I'm paying more for.

bluGill3• 8 months ago

A real luxury store will push your cart out to your car for you and then bring it back.

I have one store near me that does that - we buy most of our groceries there because they are close and cheap (Aldi is cheaper, but everyone else is more expensive)

171862744019• 8 months ago

What the hell is a luxury store? Can you name any brands? I don't think we have them.

baggy_trough2• 8 months ago

The ones I'm talking about don't have brands; they are local boutique groceries.

jmyeet• 8 months ago

What I find fascinating is the mental gymnastics people go through to justify not returning their shopping cart. It's not enough to simply be quietly selfish. Peoplw want affirmation for their actions. Often you don't need to return it to the store. There are return bays scattered all ove rthe car park. The goal is fairly simple: carts can cause accidents, damage vehicles or simply block parking spots.

Yet you'll find any number of posts from people saying "I've got my kids in the car so I'm not returng my cart". But didn't you have your kids with you when you went into the store? Can't you unload your cart, return it then walk you and your kids back to your car?

This is (IMHO) one of the worst cultural norms in America: people want to be celebrated for largely pointless selfish actions as some kind of virtuous display of their rights. Often being community-minded requires very little from individuals. You're not a hero for bucking that norm.

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

America fails the shopping cart test and it really reflects on how we treat the rest of our culture. I dont know if the chicken came before the egg, but the behavior shows nonetheless.

bitwize3• 8 months ago

Well, duh. The least you can do is wheel it into the nearby cart corral, where the store employee will shepherd them all back in with a CartManager XD (whose name is extra hilarious to me). If you know anybody who's worked in retail you understand the suckage of drawing the short straw of having to round up all the carts, especially in inclement weather.

My wife had a couple of joint replacements a few years back, and for a time she availed herself of a motorized cart where available. I LOVED driving these back into the store, and I got indignant when a staffer tried to offer to take it in for me.

One time I was approached by a kid who I swear to you, looked just like Morty Smith, offering to take the motor cart back. A little skit formed in my head, which I related to my wife on the car ride back home:

Morty: Aw, geez, I could—I could take that back for you, sir.

Rick: Oh no you don't. Mario Karting this thing back into the store is the most fun I get to have on our weekly grocery trip. How DARE you try to take that from me.

bluedino9• 8 months ago

a CartManager XD (whose name is extra hilarious to me).

They're made by 'Gatekeeper' which is even better.

You're only supposed to move 25 carts at a time with one of those, and we used to get videos from stores that we serviced where the employees would regularly see how many carts they could get that thing to move at one time...

bitwize3• 8 months ago

I find it funny because XD is an emoticon for a Cartman face and Cartman... CartManager... XD

bombcar18• 8 months ago

25 carts is nothing; that’s a single man job.

I’ve seen those trains sticking so far out of a target it’d make Union Pacific blush.

mytailorisrich• 8 months ago

Worse is people who just leave their empty basket behind at the self-checkout till. This isn't sticking it up to the supermarket, this is really just an F U to the next customer...

kalx2• 8 months ago

Wrong conclusion. Not «people», but customers at that particular store.

tomp• 8 months ago

Can't talk about others but for me personally, I:

1) always return the shopping cart when it's free (it almost never is)

2) rarely return the shopping cart when it's paid - sorry but I value my time more than €1 it cost to rent the cart, and, well, clearly there's no "social contract" - there's an "explicit contract", which says "you rent the cart for €1 and we refund you if you return it" so clearly not returning it is fine (also, someone could earn €1!)

aarond0623• 8 months ago

This is confusing to me. You value the time to return the cart more than €1, but not more than €0?

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

The mindset makes sense if you see his as an implicit service. The equivalent is if there was a dedicated cart collector every 2-3 spaces and you pay them $1 to return your cart. Now you're paying for a service.

It's like littering in a park vs not throwing your trash in the bin at a fast food restaurant. One is more of a commons that everyone has responsibility to clean up. The other is a private establishment who will clean up after guests if they don't. I'd rather just be clean regardless but I see the perspective.

tstrimple• 8 months ago

It's a similar phenomenon to day cares dealing with late pickups. They have a few chronically late parents, so they institute a late pickup fee. Parents who always picked their kids up on time because of the implicit agreement now have an explicit agreement that it's okay to pick them up late if they pay a bit more. So the incidences of late pickups actually increased at the day care. You're exchanging a trust based system for financial interactions and some people have very different motivations.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468061?seq=1

rcxdude2• 8 months ago

It's not an uncommon reaction. There's lots of things that people are on average perfectly willing to do for free but are not willing to do for a pittance sum.

fhennig• 8 months ago

I think you're misreading the situation in (2). There is still a social contract to return the carts - just because you put a coin them doesn't make that go away.

If your interpretation is true, wouldn't the shop need to have someone there to return all the unreturned carts? I have never seen such a person. Of course, if carts are in the parking lot, eventually an employee might come to return them, but it's not the intended way of handling it.

The 1€ is a deposit, and you lose it if you fail to do what is right, but the social contract to return the cart is still there, just because money is involved, doesn't mean all ethical considerations go out of the window. Returning it is still the right thing to do. The 1€ is there as an incentive for those who would just not return it if it wouldn't cost them.

Izkata4• 8 months ago

No, it may be intended as a fine of sorts, but the explicit number turns it into a cost that people are willing to pay.

First example I heard of this shift was with daycares that had trouble getting parents to pick up their kids on time, so they put a fine on it for having to stay late. This ended up increasing the problem because now there was compensation instead of guilt, and parents could make the decision that the cost was worth it.

triceratops4• 8 months ago

wouldn't the shop need to have someone there to return all the unreturned carts?

I assume it's like the bottle deposit. If enough people leave a coin in the cart and walk away someone will start returning them of their own volition just to earn the coins.

cvoss• 8 months ago

Are we talking about bringing your cart all the way back to the store entrance, or about placing your cart in one of the cart corrals located out in the parking lot? At a large store in the US, the latter are typically provided, and they are nearly always near at hand (maybe 5 spaces away). It's not a far walk.

bombcar18• 8 months ago

It’s the latter. The detailed DnD map puts “return cart to store” in lawful good and “return cart to nearby ravine” in chaotic evil iirc.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/jc0az4/...

My memory was decent!

waffletower5• 8 months ago

Since there are rarely compact carts available at the entrance of my local store, I often bring a cart in when I park initially. While more self-serving, where one decides to participate in the shopping cart social contract is of interest as well.

assemblyman2• 8 months ago

I always wondered if there are people who don't have a clear distinction between their private space/home and public space. Whether it's not putting their carts back, or talking loudly on the phone/playing music in a gym or any public space, tossing trash our of car windows, there are some people who seem to inhabit their own inner world so fully that it doesn't register that there are other people around them and that they are using a shared resource.

creatonez• 8 months ago

Cart Narc's formula is a fantastic way to end up harassing people with invisible disabilities.

Hell, a few times the victim has been someone with a visible mobility disability and they kept on harassing.

phibz• 8 months ago

Independent thought and personal accountability are sadly lacking in the US. "I see a bunch of unreturned carts. I must follow and fit it. See im justified in not returning it." :-(

tavavex6• 8 months ago

This is closer to a variant of the broken window theory than something that's US-specific. Where I am, people who don't return carts are clearly in the minority, so they probably choose to do it because they think it benefits them greatly.

assemblyman2• 8 months ago

I keep seeing the argument that non-returners are creating jobs. Does that mean they also throw their trash on the streets so cleaners have to be hired? Should one randomly break into houses so every people need to hire security guards? How about scratching cars on the street so mechanics and painters have some extra work?

scoofy2• 8 months ago

I can understand the argument insofar as it's necessary for the business to want it clean, so the result is not a tragedy of the commons.

I knew a special needs teacher when I was younger who would make this argument, but it was specifically because he worked with kids who had a history of crime, as so the argument was specifically that we need jobs for people who can't be trusted with either money or food. He would suggest not cleaning up after yourself at a fast food restaurant specifically because trash/bussing was effectively the only jobs these kids and young adults could get.

I never felt convinced that this was an effective strategy, I follow the logic, but within the logic is the assumption that putting these kids to work is a better outcome than using that capital to try and improve their situation/behavior. I honestly don't know which choice is more optimal or whether people can really change en masse.

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

I also don't want a risk of my car being dented. So there's some tragedy there if it was truly rampant.

within the logic is the assumption that putting these kids to work is a better outcome than using that capital to try and improve their situation/behavior.

Sounds like your teacher would be great in politics. "creates jobs" is much easier sell than reformation.

I'd rather fix our broken windows than pretend that some people are "destined" to stay as minimum wage workers instead of aspiring to their passions. But those can't be done in a single term.

171862744019• 8 months ago

I can understand the argument insofar as it's necessary for the business to want it clean

Here, the business wouldn't care. It would be the costumers, who would find it inconvenient, and would need to return other carts, if they want to.

s1artibartfast3• 8 months ago

There is clearly a tipping point where you either get filthy restaurants, fewer restaurants, or take out only.

Anyways, there is no shortage of necessary low skill labor that can be done unrelated to food or money.

krackers• 8 months ago

see the broken window fallacy

netsharc• 8 months ago

Heck, but jobs mean more cost for the supermarket, meaning their groceries are slightly more expensive... genius argument.

khannn• 8 months ago

I'm a certified job creator and should therefore pay less taxes

Employees got to pull those carts in by their bootstraps

system22• 8 months ago

I watched many Cart Narcs episodes. Always the same, the people look uneducated in every single one of them, mostly "Karen" types. It is about respecting society, and these people don't. In the EU, they respect and care about their society. It is all cultural.

ALDI solved this problem, even in the U.S. Their carts only work with quarters, so people go back to the cart area to get their quarters back. Maybe we should get the dollar coins circulated more so every cart in the U.S. uses those to encourage people to move their carts back. Quarters might not work everywhere in the U.S.. They probably would justify leaving their carts even more now because they will think: "Hey, next person gets a free quarter, it is better to leave it, I help someone to make money now".

bombcar18• 8 months ago

To the contrary, almost all paid airport carts offer a reward for return, but you can always find them abandoned amongst the parking

An interesting phenomenon. I will always return a Walmart cart but rarely if ever return an airport cart; probably because I love finding one “for free” and pass it on.

system22• 8 months ago

Or spending 3-4 minutes to return the cart will cost them the same amount of parking fees. Just a thought. I think carts are more complicated than they seem.

m463• 8 months ago

People who wonder about this stuff should travel to Japan.

It is sort of amazing and uplifting to see a whole society with a high level of good behavior.

- People trim their bushes and trees (they frequently look like Dr. Seuss trees)

- The sidewalks are clean, even in the most urban environments

- I've seen women leave their purse on the table when they go to the bathroom.

- People wait to cross the street

- Cars are carefully parked and aligned inside the lines

- People wait in line

- stores are well organized

waffletower5• 8 months ago

For the purposes of this specific conversation, the layout of typical Japanese supermarkets, the cost of groceries and the frequent lack of specialized parking for supermarkets, Japan is probably an irrelevant comparison. Where there are parking lots, people typically purchase only what could be carried back to their car without carts. Bicycles are used for shopping with much greater frequency than countries like the U.S. Shopping carts are typically taken and returned at the entrance of the store before the customer exits. At Uwajimaya in the United States (a Japanese asian market with stores in Oregon and Washington), remarkably, the same cultural use of shopping carts occurs.

unscaled• 8 months ago

Most people in Japan live outside of the Yamanote circle in Tokyo. Rural and Suburban supermarkets have parking lots (although in central areas they can still be quite small) and people still use cars for shopping trips, especially in the countryside.

It is true that grocery packages are much smaller than the US (since Japanese houses, even in the countryside, are smaller and I guess the average household size is smaller as wel). Shopping carts in regular supermarkets are smaller than abroad, and are usually built to house 1 or 2 shopping baskets you can also carry by hand.

But hey, we still have Costco in Japan, and package sizes and shopping cart sizes are just as big as they are in the US (although the parking lot is probably considerably more crowded). And Costco is extremely popular here. It's far messier than a Japanese supermarket and I do see inconsiderate people sometimes in Costco, but the cars are still parked nicely and most people do return their shopping carts. It would be interesting to compare Costcos in Japan and the US directly though.

iamnothere6• 8 months ago

Yes, and it generally isn’t because of laws, there’s just a lot of sensible social customs (don’t walk while eating on the street because it encourages litter, etc) and others will remind you of those customs if you break them. And unlike the US, if you break those unwritten rules and then start a fight for “content” when confronted (assault is illegal), police will actually put you in jail or deport you instead of looking the other way.

It’s not authoritarian to have a sensible set of laws that you enforce rigorously, backed by soft norms that are only enforced through social customs. Yet in the US we seem to want the inversion of this, legal enforcement of social norms with weak enforcement of hard laws. Very strange.

HDThoreaun6• 8 months ago

Japan also measures the waistline of everyone over 40 and fines their coworkers if they are too fat. Difficult to find a balance with the shame culture. US clearly not enough Japan too much.

tidenly• 8 months ago

Idiotic and completely untrue statement.

You get your waist and height measured as part of your routine health examination every year since you become a worker. Eyes, hearing, etc are also included. Its just your body's "metrics".

Your company CAN look at these (they rarely care to), but they can't fire you for them - you especially aren't fined over it. Japan is an incredibly hard country to fire or penalize workers. They can only check them in the first place because its the company that pays for these screenings in most cases. Free EKG, blood screens, and other basic health marker checks.

I'm so tired of people spreading orientalist crap about this country on the internet.

sunaookami3• 8 months ago

They don't fine workers, they fine companies and only after a certain threshold which is rarely enforced. And encouraging not being fat is not a bad thing and shouldn't be controversial, it's healthier overall.

insane_dreamer5• 8 months ago

This has much to do with the history of Japan and its inhabitants vs the history of the US and the type of people who moved here and occupied / colonized it (don't use "settled", there was no settling, only stealing). The US was largely built on individualism, high risk-high reward, lawlessness, aggression, and a lack of social cohesiveness (don't like it somewhere? there's plenty of other places to go and be on your own). Japan on the other hand, while it had wars/violence too, that happened within a highly structured society built on a form of feudalism.

sunaookami3• 8 months ago

Yeah it's the small things, friend of mine was in Japan recently and first thing he noticed is that everyone wears backpacks in front of them while riding the train as to not bother others. There are also signs for that (in fact Japan has A LOT of signs for foreigners on what to do).

It's a rare example of a working high-trust society.

there43• 8 months ago

I don't see mention of parenting.

Imagine you’re in a hurry. Your child is tired and hungry, and you are too. You’ve just loaded the groceries into the trunk and finally gotten your child strapped into the car seat. You think for just a moment that you're done. But then you realize: you still need to return the shopping cart. You should have loaded the groceries, locked the car, gone back to the cart return and then carried your child back to the car to load them into their car seat.

Now you’re faced with a dilemma with three bad options — do you take your child back out of the car, leave them unattended for a moment, or abandon the cart and go home?

cogman103• 8 months ago

I'm a parent with a child with profound autism. You leave your kid in the car for the 30 seconds it takes to return the cart. It's never been an issue and the kiddo is perfectly content waiting for a short period while I walk the cart back.

My god, people act like there's kidnappers at every grocery store just waiting for this one moment to abduct a child.

cush3• 8 months ago

I don't see mention of parenting.

When I read this I thought you meant bad parents not teaching their kids to return their carts

dilemma... do you...

What exactly is the risk of leaving the kid while you quickly return the cart?

there43• 8 months ago

All I'm asking is that we give caregivers a little empathy and some grace. To your question - There's not much risk. Lock the car, return the cart.

But what I'm offering is that if I saw a parent leaving a cart, I wouldn't judge and assume that it's because of a glaring moral failing.

scoofy2• 8 months ago

It takes 30 seconds.

idiotsecant2• 8 months ago

Congratulations on being the subject of the thread.

id003• 8 months ago

I usually just leave them in the cart and we go and return it together. Or now as they became older - they push it themselves to the corrals (with me next to them of course).

Feels like a lazy justification

there43• 8 months ago

Feels like a lazy justification

I try to give people kindness and grace, even for small things. Maybe we can sometimes reframe a "lost cart" as something other than an act of laziness or aggression against society. Maybe it’s a sign someone was just having a hard moment.

When I take a stray cart back, sure, it could’ve been left by someone careless. But it also could’ve been left by someone overwhelmed. Maybe a parent, an exhausted worker, someone barely holding it together because of some struggle we'll never know.

Returning that cart might be a tiny act of kindness toward someone who needed it that day.

cpburns20094• 8 months ago

It's not hard. Lock the car and return the cart. Your kid(s) will be fine unattended in the car for 20 seconds crying or not. If this really distresses you, park in the back by a cart corral.

bombcar18• 8 months ago

I’ve accidentally parked inside a larger cart corral - I thought it was a space between two.

Menards corrals are literally carports they sell in the store (and hence covered which is nice).

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

If you can't leave your kid unattneded for 30 seconds, I'd worry about bringing them in for an hour long shopping trip to begin with.

tauchunfall• 8 months ago

I looks more this is about managing fears and worries. This is also close to helicopter parenting, i.e. parents who are "overattentive and overly fearful for their child, particularly outside the home".

I don't know, in 90s Germany my parents just let me wait in the car for a minute and there was only the radio I could listen to. In elementary school I just walked to school even in darkness. And in high school I walked 15 minutes to the bus. That was the time when some middle class parents started bringing their children to the bus with the car, but for most of the other children is was normal to just walk.

But yeah times change. My grand-parents walked 10 km by foot to school on the street on 6 days per week after war.

HDThoreaun6• 8 months ago

imagine thinking returning your cart after putting your kid in the car is a bad option.

kevinsync2• 8 months ago

I already wrote something else in here, but one other thought I had afterwards was related to IKEA carts -- they have four 360-degree casters, which makes them extra prone to just flying in literally any direction with a bit of wind if they're not returned to the corrals. Strangely enough, I rarely ever encounter an abandoned cart there, or full corrals; they're almost always empty! Curious if IKEA policy is far more rigorous than a grocery store on cart retrieval and return.

bombcar18• 8 months ago

Many people only use the carts to the loading area which has a well-patrolled corral next to it (any employee tasked with helping you load returns to the building with some or all of the carts).

The 360x4 casters are pretty insane the first time you realize it.

al_borland8• 8 months ago

Last time I went to IKEA I couldn’t physically get the cart beyond the loading area. There were barricades setup that seemed sized specifically to stop carts from leaving the area.

As someone who went there alone, this was a real problem. The setup really assumes at least two people are showing up. One to wait with the purchased items, and another to get the car.

I’ve avoided IKEA because of this. I don’t know how to deal with it logistically.

QuadmasterXLII• 8 months ago

Internet behavioral science with terrible selection bias round 2: classify whether someone will comment here that they don’t put their carts back based on their previous comments. Then, interpret the classifier to see what makes them tick

Xorakios• 8 months ago

When on an extended trip to Delray Beach, Florida and shopping at the Publix market I tried to walk in with a cart that was lurking in a parking space.

An employee somewhat angrily explained to me that I was threatening his job because collecting carts and greeting customers was part of the Publix customer experience.

fsckboy• 8 months ago

I once got yelled at by a Safeway employee because I didn't respond to her "have a nice day, sir"

"I SAID, HAVE A NICE DAY SIR!"

(just in case you live in a civilized part of the world, understand: this was in a place where the checker doesn't lift a finger to bag your groceries, that's your job)

MathMonkeyMan2• 8 months ago

Publix also advises customers not to tip the kid who unloads the groceries into your car. You will accept our service and you will do nothing more!

brettgriffin7• 8 months ago

Promoting cart return might be as simple as setting a new norm

Nobody who does this is not aware that returning the shopping card is the normal, expected, and 'right' behavior. There just isn't a moral hazard that prevents them from doing the wrong behavior.

I think there is a larger philosophical/moral question of WHY should someone do the 'right' thing in the absense of a moral hazard. It's something I've thought a lot about over the last couple of years.

As the 4chan Shopping car theory points out, the cost of leaving the cart is zero. And the benefit is the saved time/energy. Why shouldn't a rational self-optimizing person leave the cart there? Why shouldn't they hold the subway door open to catch the train? Why shouldn't they pull up the very front of the offramp and merge at the last second? Zero cost, all benefit.

I have a self-motto of 'do the right thing' in virtually anything I do. In those examples, I'd return the carts, wouldn't hold a train door open, and would miss an exit and turn around.

But WHY do I do it? Why do I feel like I HAVE to do it? Am I actually experiencing any benefit in life over those who don't?

iamnothere6• 8 months ago

I think the issue is that the long-term decline in social trust—and the accompanying rise in surveillance, authoritarian enforcement, and costs/prices—happens too slowly for people to notice and associate with their own actions. If every time they left a cart out there was a new camera or scowling security officer on their next visit, they might notice and change their behavior. But as it is, they don’t notice their own contribution to the consequences that they so often complain about.

(Just so nobody misunderstands me, this is not to say that I want more cameras and security officers. Quite the opposite, which is why I don’t like casual antisocial behavior and petty crime.)

tavavex6• 8 months ago

But WHY do I do it? Why do I feel like I HAVE to do it? Am I actually experiencing any benefit in life over those who don't?

If I try to dig in deeper for why I also feel that way, I guess it's not about coercion or fear of judgement/retribution. I just have an innate understanding that other people have their own lives, and I don't feel like it's worth it to do things that have a minuscule "benefit" for me while being a far outweighed drawback for multiple strangers. Even though it doesn't benefit me, it does benefit the community I'm in, and is one of many things that make the society I live in relatively nice.

Not returning the shopping cart saves a rounding error's worth of time, but now multiple car drivers are annoyed in a major way when shopping carts are rolling back and forth, ramming into parked cars or taking up empty parking spots. Employees now have to spend more of their time getting all the carts, sometimes in bad weather. Not worth it.

Holding the subway door saves several minutes for me, but makes the schedule tighter for the operator and forces hundreds of people to wait a few more seconds for me. This difference between my benefit and others' drawback isn't as drastic as the shopping carts, so the bar for me to do it is lower (I would probably do it if trains were >10 minutes apart). But it also has a sketchy feeling to it - I'd trust that the train will remain stopped, but the chance of you getting caught on the side of a moving train is >0%. It has happened many times before, especially in older systems.

I don't see what the benefit is for leaving a highway at the last possible second. If anything, this erratic behavior is unexpected and is more likely to lead to an accident. Not worth it, even discounting any feelings you have for other people.

brettgriffin7• 8 months ago

I don't see what the benefit is for leaving a highway at the last possible second. If anything, this erratic behavior is unexpected and is more likely to lead to an accident. Not worth it, even discounting any feelings you have for other people.

In large metro areas, exit lanes can be back up, usually because there is a light at the end of the exit. For instance, exit 32 on the BQE can backup to the point that you sit in the exit lane for 10+ minutes as batches of cars move through the intersection. To circumvent the wait, some people just pull up to the front of the exit lane and merge in and go through the next next batch of lights. A lot of people will try to prevent you from merging, but someone will always eventually let you through. It's called exit lane jumping. It's illegal but I highly doubt anyone gets pulled over for it.

johnnyanmac19• 8 months ago

But WHY do I do it? Why do I feel like I HAVE to do it? Am I actually experiencing any benefit in life over those who don't?

You start to skip the little things in life and it creeps up into the big things. "Do I have to return the shopping cart?" "Do I have to cook tonight?" "Do I have to shower today?" "Do I have to acknowledge that chatty neighbor and instead just walk past him?".

When your care starts to slip about participating in society, you start to disassociate with society. And I think times like these are where we need to care more than ever about participating.

rainsford• 8 months ago

One explanation I've heard that resonates with me is that we subconsciously feel as if we're playing a more complex and less obvious version of the prisoner's dilemma.

We intuitively understand that society experiences the greatest collective benefit when people generally cooperate. We also understand that while defecting (i.e. behaving in a selfish and anti-social way) might benefit us more as individuals, that's only true so long as others aren't also defecting. If they do, not only is society worse off but you personally are worse off as well than if everybody cooperated. And we understand that personally defecting leads to others doing the same.

Leaving your cart randomly in the parking lot, holding the train door open, or cutting across traffic may optimize your personal outcome, but the more people who behave like you the worse your grocery store parking lot experience gets, the more delayed your train is, and the longer you're stuck in traffic.

The nuance here is that modern societies are large enough that you can buy into the idea that your personal behavior does not influence the behavior of others in a way that will come back around to bite you. In a large metro area, what is the probability that the driver you cut off will be in a position to cut you off tomorrow? Ignoring the fact that society is smaller than you think when you look at sub groups like people who regularly drive on a certain road at a certain time, you have to consider second and third order effects. If cutting people off in traffic leads to more people cutting each other off in traffic, the impact spreads until it could easily come back around to your personal traffic experience with a few degrees of separation.

Fundamentally I think rational self-optimizing people realize that shitty personal behavior leads if only in a small way to the overall enshitification of society and that sooner or later this will come back around to negatively impact them personally. The people who engage in such behavior anyways aren't more rationally self-optimizing, they're either too stupid to see the connection or nihilistic enough to not care.

bombcar18• 8 months ago

Zipper merging is the correct merging assuming you keep speeds correct.

States that are “too polite” to do it have to remind people to do it.

https://www.dot.state.mn.us/zippermerge/

morcus• 8 months ago

There's a difference between zipper merging on a lane closure (which is what the article described) and what the person you are responding to described.

You are not supposed to block your lane of traffic because you didn't want to wait like everyone else.

brettgriffin7• 8 months ago

A zipper merge is only applicable to a lane that is ending or has an obligation to merge. In exit lane jumping, the car is coming from a lane that does not end and has no obligation to merge. In fact, at their point of entry, you will notice a solid white separating the two lanes, indicating you cannot even legally merge.

kgwxd4• 8 months ago

There's no moral hazard to not brushing your teeth. If you want a healthy society, you have to brush your parking lots.

brettgriffin7• 8 months ago

No moral hazard, but there is a hazard to not brushing your teeth: cavities, and more explicitly, the financial cost of having cavities repaired. Even the best dental insurance plans in America are capped at $1500 - $3000 of benefits a year, usually less than a single root canal or crown.

But that does open the door to a very interesting question (far outside of the scope of this discussion): would people change their habits of brushing their teeth if that hazard didn't exist, e.g. your dental repairs were free? D:

seanmcdirmid2• 8 months ago

Sometimes my cart gets accidentally out of bounds (because I parked too close to the grocer store's property line) and the wheels lock up. Then I try to drag it somewhere out of the way at least.

When my kid was a baby, I used to worry that someone might think I'm abandoning him or leaving him in a car unattended when walking the cart back (no one else with me), but it never became a concern unless the weather was too hot. I never did figure out how "leaving kids unattended" laws worked out with returning a shopping cart where the nearest corral was half way across the parking lot.

bombcar18• 8 months ago

It’s the wolf/goat/cabbage problem.

Take the cart with child to the car.

Unload the groceries, return the cart and child to the corral.

Remove child and return to the car.

If this is not possible the child is large enough to survive half a minute unsupervised or you have to park next to a corral anyway (since you couldn’t bring the child to the store to get a cart).

seanmcdirmid2• 8 months ago

Ya, no, thats not very feasible. The child is perfectly capable of surviving for the 30 seconds to one minute needed. The question was about law, not pragmatics, anyways, since those are the times we live in.

171862744019• 8 months ago

I never did figure out how "leaving kids unattended" laws worked out

That is also exclusively an US problem, and sounds quite insane to my european mind.

BrandoElFollito2• 8 months ago

It is certainly a US problem.

In France people return their carts. Some carts have coins, some don't but they are vastly, vastly returned.

Coins were introduced in France in the 80s (I still remember my parents pondering about that). The reason was not really that people would not return the carts, but rather to incenive them not to take them away.

People would sometimes (not a massive trend ) ride the cart home and then hope for the best.

This has today completely disappeared but the coins are still there in most of the shops.

mhb2• 8 months ago

I'm confused. Are you saying that this is a unique problem to the US and that France used to have a different unique problem, that is, in my estimation, worse? And that it was solved by requiring deposits on the carts.

And instituting the deposits worked and you seem to be suggesting that the current existence of deposits is somehow vestigial and unrelated to the continuing discouragement of stealing carts?

BrandoElFollito2• 8 months ago

Yes and yes :)

The vast, vast majority of people here will bring their cart back, deposit or not. There are some b ok eck sheep but you will see maybe 2 carts left in a whole large parking lot (if at all). This is not a matter of deposit anymore, you can get coins at the reception desk.

So the problem of leaving the cats was not one we needed to solve.

People taking the carts - yes. It was just a small fraction, but enough for the shops to take action. They betted on there fact that 1 or 2 francs (this was before the euro) wrote be enough to deter people from yelling the carts with them. And it worked. And it pissed of the best majority that was not doing it. Today everyone is used to the system so it stayed.

I think (but this is just a personal opinion) that having the carts locked helps with their bulk transport

171862744019• 8 months ago

There is a difference between leaving the cart in a random parking lot and not returning it and to decide to just take it (stealing). The latter is a deliberate action, that involves more work, not less.

al_borland8• 8 months ago

It’s not that big of a problem. It’s overblown online. At the grocery stores near me, I’d say 95% of carts are returned to the cart corral.

antonymoose• 8 months ago

It’s all relative to your locale. When I lived in the city it was a scourge no matter the time of day, didn’t matter which part of town I would go to, some entitled persons would leave their shopping carts in random parking spaces, or in the plant beds, grass medians, etc. with an empty cart return rack mere steps away.

Living in small town rural America today, it’s just not a problem, folks simply don’t do it. The only exception to that statement is you will occasionally see a very elderly and infirm customer leaving their cart in the non-parking portions of the handicap parking. Of course you’ll also see just as many folks taking those carts with them inside. It’s a nice little balance. Perhaps coincidentally this area is very calm and very low crime.

kjkjadksj3• 8 months ago

I assume people litter in france which is essentially the same thing: leaving ones problems for others to collect.

JohnBooty8• 8 months ago

About once or twice per year, I might leave my cart outside a corral if there's none nearby and I'm sick or in a terrible hurry. (In no cases do I leave it somewhere where it could roll and strike a car)

However...

On the way in to the store, I habitually take one of those "stranded" carts outside the corral. Thus saving employee labor. I do that all the time. So by my thinking I'm actually running a positive karma balance here. I'm probably at like a 10:1 lifetime ratio.

insane_dreamer5• 8 months ago

TIL "Cart Narc" is an actual thing.

hahamaster• 8 months ago

The shopping centre where I shop frequently (Europe) has a large outdoor parking space and every 20 meters or so there's a little kiosk where you can return the cart. People do because it's actually easier to return it than to worry about crashing into it when you're getting out of the parking spot. From time to time an employee goes out and collects all the carts from kiosks and gets them back to the shop. I don't know if it's the same way in the US, maybe some people don't return it simply because they parked too far from the entrance.

_--__--__• 8 months ago

Not so much a kiosk, but American grocery stores often have one parking spot every other row that is blocked off with a fence/barrier and marked as a cart return storage. But that has its own problems because if someone hastily shoves a cart in there instead of stacking them in line it takes up too much space and creates a dangerous extrusion into the adjacent spots.

peacebeard• 8 months ago

“Carelessness, in Fitzgerald’s vision, is a way of wielding power. It’s a certainty that the world exists to absorb your damage.”

MathMonkeyMan2• 8 months ago

I suspect that the reason is: "I don't want to do that, and if I don't do it then somebody else eventually will, and if they don't eventually do it then that's their problem, and in any case I don't care."

Imagine a business that didn't periodically fetch their carts. The parking lot would be a hazard of loose carts, and the store would run out of carts for customers. So the store will have to do it anyway.

Returning a cart is a courtesy -- one where it is very visible (temporarily) when the courtesy has not been extended.

171862744019• 8 months ago

I think here the business would rather employ workers to yell at costumers, to return their carts, rather than start to collect them. Well, rather it does not need to employ them, they would do it own their own, but only until after the other costumers failed to yell at these people.

ghufran_syed• 8 months ago

why is returning the cart intrinsically some sign of “goodness” but returning your plates to the kitchen and washing them at a restaurant is not? The customer is at the store to fulfill their needs, not the store’s. Taking the groceries from the checkout to the car in a cart helps fulfill the customer’s aims. Returning the cart does not, same as picking up trash in the store car park does not. And the revenue from customers pays for return of the carts from the parking lot, so most customers feel that is a better deal than a place that forces them to return the carts.

The original article and many of the comments have a hugely moralistic tone - where are people expected to learn these implicit rules? If the store doesn’t care enough to communicate these expectations (assuming they even have them, and that they don’t only exist in the minds of the self-appointed “cart police”), why should customers follow them?

valleyer4• 8 months ago

where are people expected to learn these implicit rules? If the store doesn’t care enough to communicate these expectations (assuming they even have them, and that they don’t only exist in the minds of the self-appointed “cart police”), why should customers follow them?

The rules are not implicit; there are typically giant signs saying "RETURN CART HERE" over a metal cart corral that often contains other carts.

People are expected to learn this during their first or second trip to a grocery store that offers carts.

Similarly, at a full-service restaurant, you will be able to notice busboys picking up used tableware, and you will notice a scarcity of customer-accessible garbage bins (as compared to, say, a self-service fast-food restaurant).

If you are ever unsure of the protocol, you are always welcome to ask an employee. Employees at these businesses are typically distinguished by wearing a uniform.

Hope these tips help you on your future trips to Kroger/McDonald's/Olive Garden.

insane_dreamer5• 8 months ago

That's because the business is trying to save on their own manpower costs by shifting some of the burden to their customers -- much like self-checkout.

If by returning my cart I was helping the employees, I'd be inclined to go out of my way to do so. But actually all I'm doing is helping the business, who is trying to cut as many employees as possible (talking about big stores like Walmart, Target, not some small local grocery that might even be employee owned).

kjkjadksj3• 8 months ago

Because the cart doesn’t belong in the road or parking lot the same way your plate doesn’t belong upturned on the floor of the restaurant. I’m not sure about you but I will even stack my plates and dishes and silverware so the bus boy can grab it all in one go. Maybe that makes me some sort of a holy man.

kstrauser• 8 months ago

BTW, a lot of bussers prefer you not do that. They have their own system for stacking things in their trays, and they have to un-stack your things to do it their way. Like, they generally can’t pick up your whole tidy stack, set it in their tub, and walk away like that.

My acquaintances in food service tell me they appreciate the thought, but rather you not go through the effort.

panny• 8 months ago

With regard to plates...

https://www.businessinsider.com/waitress-on-tiktok-shows-dif...

With regard to carts, because they roll around, into cars, and cause damage. Leaving your cart loose in the lot is a great way to damage other people's vehicles. The first ding in my first new car was caused by a loose cart some asshole left in the lot while I was shopping.

tguedes2• 8 months ago

I was going to comment this exact thing about stacking plates. I think most servers/ex-servers also do this regardless of age. It's even easier to do than returning a shopping cart.

gilbetron• 8 months ago

I've found an anecdotal correlation that the (relatively few) people that have moralized at me about returning shopping carts also tend to dislike self-checkout at the same stores. I guess it is immoral to have someone return your cart, but moral to have someone scan your groceries? I generally don't return my cart, but I mostly self-checkout. I'm pure evil apparently.

valleyer4• 8 months ago

Full-service checkout is a service that is explicitly offered by (most) stores, and yes, it's a service many people like -- in part because of the poor UX of the self-checkout machines. ("Please return item to the bagging area.")

I don't think many people would object to full-service cart return, in which employees immediately pick up your cart when a customer is finished loading their groceries into the car. But few (if any?) stores actually intend to offer that, as evidenced by the carts that sit for long periods of time strewn about the parking area.

kgwxd4• 8 months ago

where are people expected to learn these implicit rules?

In my experience, someone that needs to be taught rules like that, at an age old enough to be pushing around their own shopping cart, is lost forever anyway. All it takes is half a second of considering what might go on with that cart after you leave it.

EdwardDiego• 8 months ago

I didn't see a mention of "they resent being gouged for essentials by oligopolies, and so signal defiance by not returning the cart". But it's real, especially as the cost of living rises faster than inflation.

Mawr3• 8 months ago

I circumvent the problem by not using carts.

If I take a cart into the store I'll walk out with a full one. If I take a basket, I'll walk out with a full one. If I take nothing, I'll walk out with my hands full.

I'd rather buy a hands-full worth of stuff than a cart-full.

marethyu• 8 months ago

I think it also explains why most people don't rate after transactions in Facebook marketplace.

mdavid626• 8 months ago

Only in the US. Here in Europe people simply return them.

rcxdude2• 8 months ago

This is a little amusing to me because at a supermarket I cycle to there's a bit of a general understanding that there should be a stash of carts near the bike stands, so I can usually arrive, pick up one from there, then leave it there for the next person, and save everyone some time.

gverrilla3• 8 months ago

USA safari

HocusLocus• 8 months ago

Parked overnight at a midwest Walmart (when that was a thing) and got out to do something at 4am trying not to look like a predator. Ten carts were pushed over the embankment into the creek. Lifted them out and put them where they could be hosed off. What gets into people?

PeterStuer• 8 months ago

Asociality, laziness and entitlement, not necessarily in that order.

jiveturkey3• 8 months ago

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?

Because you need the stability of the cart (as a walker aid) itself.

rkomorn• 8 months ago

That leaves me wondering how they got from their car to the cart in the first place, then.

Maybe getting from the car to the cart is worth the effort, but returning the cart is not worth the effort of getting back to the car.

jiveturkey3• 8 months ago

They parked near one left by a rude person, not near the cart corral.

I'm not just being imaginative for the sake of argument. One of my parents does exactly this.

I do thank you for not saying "begs the question"! ;)

jiveturkey3• 8 months ago

TFA would be much much better if he'd conducted it across different social/cultural demographics. JP vs EU vs US vs CA for example.

I also didn't see any post-cart interview of people that returned the cart.

As it is I found it a waste of 2 minutes reading time. It's not somewhat scientific at all.

Fwirt• 8 months ago

On the other hand, I have a friend who worked in retail as a teenager tell me that employees sometimes appreciate carts getting left out, as it means they get to go for a nice leisurely walk outside, away from the toxic work atmosphere, to go round them up. So while carts getting left out may be positive for other shoppers, it might be doing a disservice to overworked employees.

insane_dreamer5• 8 months ago

Honestly, the thing that bothers me the most about the article is that I learned there are people who not only go around telling people they didn't return their cart, but that they film the people as they do so. That type of online vigilante/public shaming is bad, IMHO. And then the public voyerism of everyone watching it and maybe commenting on it. Such strange human behavior. I can see why many people would respond with "who the fuck are you to be filming me".

matt-attack• 8 months ago

If everyone returns their cart, retailers will certainly eliminate jobs. I see it as “job creator” behavior.

When I see someone returning a cart I scream “job killer!”

Why don't people return their shopping carts?

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