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.”
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
That they can barely articulate a verbalized post-hoc rationalization* for that kind of behavior doesn't prevent them from lacking the minimum processing power needed to achieve awareness of how they are leaving ungreased the machinery of the commons. Into which they will keep being embedded, pulling levers left and right all day long.
Even a moderately zero-sum minded sociopath can be aware of the perks of investing a modicum of well-placed niceness; if for no other reason, just to avoid losing social capital.
* And probably a memetic one, hardly an original thought.
> Our college study group meets a few times a week. They’re long sessions, three or four hours each. Whenever someone runs out for food, we all chip in a little extra so the runner doesn’t have to pay. Simple deal: “If you fly, I’ll buy.”
> About an hour into one session, one of the girls stretches and says she’s heading to Dunkin’ Donuts.
> Me: “Ooh, I’ll buy if you fly.”
> She stops mid-step and gives me this horrified look.
> Girl: “I don’t bring food to other people. Servants do that.”
The articulate reason for not bringing a cart is because their station in life is above menial work.
Regarding social capital, the story goes on and finishes with:
> The room goes dead silent.
> We’ve been doing this for weeks, with everyone taking turns, no big deal. But apparently, today, we’ve got royalty in our study group. She wondered why she was left out of any group meals after that…
Now imagine someone with money, who never had to clean up after others (and hires people to clean after themselves), and has little interaction with the working class. Why do you think they'll care about what the plebes think?
Wow. Can you give some more geographical context on where this happened and where the girl is from? (Obviously, not revealing personal details)
I have known some rich snobs in my life, but I have never been someplace where a even the rich snobs would say something like that out loud (even if maybe they were thinking it)
There's a minority of people wealthy enough to grease everything with money or really powerful connections. In a conversation involving people doing their own shopping and eating at places where you are presumed to take your tray to the bin I wasn't even thinking about them.
Those who lack that surplus wealth are "leaving money on the table", so to speak, by not caring about others. That's dumb.
And her pedigree or whatever gave her those aristocratic ways didn't save her from mild ostracism at the end of the story, so... That's social capital she left on the table. That's also kinda dumb even if she had enough money/power to enable god mode. It's even dumber if she didn't have it.
A customer returns two abandoned carts. Another customer assumes the first is an employee. After learning the truth, “Stupid woke b****! Why are you trying to confuse people!”
> Like most fast food places, there are several trash cans conveniently placed with counters attached, so people can clean up their own messes.
> There are always those special folks, though, who leave their trash on the table for the employees to clean up. Usually, it’s just trash, but there is this group of four young guys who always aim to outdo themselves.
It took exceptional circumstances for them to face consequences, in this case, losing a pair of expensive sunglasses. Again, it clearly wasn't the first time.
> A mum and her young child are coming through my lane when the child spills a lot of juice all over the floor and part of my register. The mum, without hesitation, says to the child:
> Customer: “Don’t worry. It’s their job to tidy up.”
Again, there is rebuke
> My shoulders sink as I’m about to accept my fate, when my manager, who happened to be nearby, runs over with a wet mop (we keep one by the registers at all times just in case) and hands it to the mum.
> Manager: “Nope. Your monkey, your circus.”
> Customer: A bit discombobulated. “That… that’s not how it works!”
But the reason these stories make that web site is because rebuke is rare, and thus noteworthy, while showing that a lot of people - not just those who are wealthy or have really powerful connections - do this.
I fully acknowledge their existence. I'm sure I most certainly engage into equivalent antisocial behavior in some way or another wherever I most lack awareness, and my sole point is that, for most of us, when we are doing that, we dumb.
Slightly veering OT:
While I get the sore need for a place to vent after being subjected to a customer-facing workday, the website you keep linking to gives me in aggregate the rage farming vibes that are as prone to distort everyday reality as blind naïveté could be.
I don't really think you understand my point. It isn't simple antisocial behavior. It's a multi-generational learned belief in a hierarchical class structure which will persist so long as enough people reject equality and solidarity, and instead actively protect their class privilege. (In modern parlance, "anti-woke" is roughly the opposite of "check your privilege").
To give but one of many examples, when rail passengers called Black porters "George", as if the porters were owned by George Pullman, those passengers reinforced racist Jim Crow laws. There were not dumb or sociopaths, but rather gained more social capital from others of their class (or more powerful) than was lost to the Black porters.
I have duly noted your bothsiderism position. My point, however, was to give counter-examples, such as verbalized explanations which were not post hoc, to show why I disagreed with your characterizations.
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
To me that blows my mind, not because of viewing the outside as trash, but being content with living in trash. To me the observation, that the outside is a giant trash, would give me a desire to order it.
I have heard this opinion echoed by Indians, the combination of both the outside not being their problem, and thinking someone else (lower caste) will take care of it.
There are city workers and occasionally homeless people who pickup trash (to salvage or sell). I'm not sure how this opinion of theirs is formed but I can assure you nobody is throwing around trash with anything remotely caste related in their mind. It isn't even in consideration.
Its plain old apathy and no sense of responsibility or shared ownership. Outside is just something you share with other 1.4 billion people of the country.
The cycle usually goes like one idiot starts throwing trash, other idiots start adding their trash too, few weeks/months govt workers do a bare minimum job of clean-up, repeat.
I'm talking about people spitting in front of the elevator doors, people opening their mail in the common building area and immediately throwing the envelope on the floor, people finishing their drink in front of the building and discarding the bottle by the side of the entrance door
We don't need alien tech to solve these, it's 100% an education issue.
They should be educated, sure, but this can't be an education issue. Rather an issue of crappy upbringing and low intellect or, when it's a cultural thing, crappy culture.
This depends if you only understand learning in school to be education, or if you mean the whole education that a pupil underwent, which I think was the case here. To me upbringing is another word for education.
That makes sense, but sometimes it's even more confusing than that!
When I lived in Philadelphia here in the USA, it would vary street by street and block by block even when there were no ethnic or economic divides.
One block would have litter all over the place and the next one would be clean. To this day, I am still puzzled by that.
There are some very mundane possible explanations, probably due to a combination of pedestrian traffic patterns and wind. (My observation is that some % of litter, probably a large % IMO, is simply trash that blew out of trashcans as opposed to being intentionally discarded)
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.
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.
I try to grab an outside shopping cart to leave the world slightly less chaotic than when I entered; which is all we can do in life, perhaps.
But now and then I find one of the electric ride-a-carts and that’s the reward for all my work; riding the scootypuff jr in to the glorious chords of … the Walmart theme song.
> I try to grab an outside shopping cart to leave the world slightly less chaotic than when I entered; which is all we can do in life, perhaps
I lived in several European countries for many years. I then moved to the US a few years ago.
The US strikes me as a less civilised country, in the sense that people, on average don't return the shopping cart. In the first year after I moved, I kept returning the shopping cart, but, after seeing many others not do it, I stopped. I stopped even though I agree it is the right thing to do because I felt like a fool every time I did it. Other people decided their time is too important to return the cart, so why should I be the sucker who does it?
This isn't the only example of uncivilised behaviour I've noticed in the US. Here are other examples: bypassing a long queue of cars only to merge into the lane at the last possible second, skipping red lights if no cars are around, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and forcing other to walk around me, not saying "you're welcome", not giving up my seat on public transportation to e.g. old people, littering.
Every time I see someone break these markers of civilised society, makes me less likely to abide by them next time.
* The time spent adjacent to the traffic lane should be used calibrating your speed with the speed of traffic, once you're at the front you should then be able to merge into an open spot without causing any change to the speed of the cars behind you. So many times I see people zip quickly to the front then merge in and slam on their brakes, causing an extra delay to ripple back through traffic. Some people do this at the beginning of the merge lane which is even worse.
* Once you get there you should endeavor to zipper merge so multiple cars aren't trying to squeeze into one spot. As a corollary, if you're already in the lane that's being merged into you should leave an open space big enough for one vehicle to enter at this point, or better yet consider leaving the lane entirely.
* And by that I mean leave the lane to move deeper into the highway, don't exit into the merging lane just to zip ahead and cut back in, this decidedly does not improve traffic flows.
From what I can see, it's not about higher throughput (which stays the same)
It's about reducing queue length (you use 2 lanes instead of one, so the queue length is halved) and smaller speed differences between cars on adjacent lanes.
Anyway, I'm not talking about cases where one lane is closed (which is what WSDOT and the Minesotta doc talk about). I'm talking about cases where there is a one lane offroad from the highway, with a queue of cars waiting to take it. Plenty of people will skip the entire queue and try to merge right at the end, blocking half of their own lane while waiting for a gap in the queue.
If there is a right turn only lane, and a straight lane, and the right turn only lane is backed up with people queuing, you are not making traffic go faster by merging in at the last second. You are slowing down a bunch of people trying to turn, and blocking the people trying to go straight.
You can change straight/right/left here and it all holds. Zipper merges are for merges, when 2 lanes of traffic become one, and everyone merging early is a little bit worse. Above is just selfish.
Yeah, as someone living in Germany, returning shopping carts sounds like a non-issue. The only case where people don't return shopping carts are homeless people, who use it to store there personal belongings. So it's deliberate and they do not litter the world with shopping carts, but actively use them.
> I stopped even though I agree it is the right thing to do because I felt like a fool every time I did it... why should I be the sucker who does it?
You really are a fool. Who willingly gives up the chance to get some free exercise and feel morally superior? I'm over here happily returning others' shopping carts, not just my own, and basking in the knowledge of how I'm a better human being than you maest.
Perhaps I'm reading this too literally, but "on average?" This is a very flawed society, but I don't think I've ever seen the rando stranded carts equalling or outnumbering the returned ones.
I'm nearly 50 and have been to many, many parking lots including some truly forsaken ones. The parking lot at the Walmart near me is a travesty. People dump trash on the ground there, and I don't mean simple littering. It's so gross. It makes you feel like society is crumbling and that civilization was perhaps a mistake in the first place.
And yet...
I just returned from a quick trip there several minutes ago. I naturally thought of this thread (because I'm insane) while traversing the parking lot. I counted four unreturned carts, and several dozen properly corralled carts. The ratio was at least 10:1, possibly more.
This isn't "my" Walmart, but here's one near me that's notorious for being a bit of a Mad Max situation. If you switch to satellite view, you can see that even here the coralled carts seem to greatly outnumber the stranded ones.
bypassing a long queue of cars only to merge into the lane
at the last possible second
While again not doubting that US is worse than many other countries, I wonder if some amount of this is due to our uh, organically sprawling road system. Because I have definitely been one of the people doing this at times, but it was always due to quite honestly misunderstanding what lane I needed to be in.
Anecdotally I've heard that our drivers are nowhere near the worst, but I don't have firsthand experience.
Does it have anything to do with US parking lots being huge? I usually ship at Lidl, so the parking lot can hold maybe 50 cars. It takes 1 minute to return the cart, and there's usually a car parked next to me, so there isn't actually space to leave it (unless I'm an asshole and leave it in front of another car).
When there are large parking lots, there are multiple cart return areas scattered throughout the lot. Otherwise things would be really inefficient, to an even more nightmarish (and money-costing) degree.
Not sure if you're from the US, but the problem is objectively not as bad here as people say. If you look at various Walmarts (usually these are reliably some of the worst parking lots in any given area) in Google Maps (switch to satellite view) the reality is that the vast majority of people here actually do return their carts properly.
America is very big and diverse, and local culture varies wildly. You can go to a Whole Foods store in one part of a city and almost everyone returns their carts there, and then you can go to a Walmart in another part of the city and it looks like something out of a zombie movie, with carts and trash littering the parking lot.
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.
Being nice to a waiter doesn't require additional work. Also, being a jerk to the waiter hurts another human being directly and is a strategic error because it is more likely to cause them to spit in your food than it is to get you better service.
In contrast, leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly. It just makes a supermarket run slightly less efficiently.
This could theoretically raise prices by increasing labor requirements, but it's not a linear relationship. Failing to return a cart would only increase prices if enough people do it to cross the threshold at which they would need to have an additional cart-collecting employee.
It's still an anti-social behavior, but the impact is more nebulous.
> it is more likely to cause them to spit in your food than it is to get you better service.
I would count on the waiter not being a jerk, and trying to hurt people just because they are a jerk.
> In contrast, leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly. It just makes a supermarket run slightly less efficiently.
What? It is hardly any extra work, you also have walked the same way when taking the cart. And it annoys people after you, including yourself, when you come in the next day and find a shopping cart standing on your parking lot.
> Being nice to a waiter doesn't require additional work.
Maintaining a social interaction is intellectual more work, than pushing a cart around. This very much depends on your personal preference, to some people social interactions are a lot of work.
> Failing to return a cart would only increase prices if enough people do it to cross the threshold at which they would need to have an additional cart-collecting employee.
So you rely on all the other people not taking liberties, you should be allowed to do? What do you think you are?
>What? It is hardly any extra work, you also have walked the same way when taking the cart.
It depends on the store. If it's a very large parking lot, and you're parked at the far end of it, it can be a long walk to get back to your car. If the store didn't bother putting any designated cart-return locations in the lot (which happens a lot), then returning the cart means doubling your walking time. So it really is a lot of extra work, or at least time, so it is understandable why some people would avoid this extra work/time and take the easy way out.
>And it annoys people after you
Yes, but you don't ever see these people; they come after you've left. It's not like being rude to the waiter's face.
This whole category of decision making basically consists of taking observable things and then using them to infer other things despite the correlations often only being barely better than a coin toss. It's the same logic by which the police harass you more if you check more bad demographic checkboxes.
You can make an argument that it's different because the stuff being measured is at the other end of the "how easily can they change it" spectrum but that doesn't change the fundamental accuracy of the correlation. Something like this shouldn't be used for anything serious.
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.
Unless you're "having kids" in the sense that you're about to give birth to one, saving 30-60 seconds isn't going to make a difference in your day. It's like trying to optimize your travel timing so you can stop at fewer red lights. Maybe it gives someone the illusion of efficiency, but no one is really saving any time.
Most people who leave carts don't mind them blocking others' paths. If you're going out of your way to push one over the curb and into the muddy grass, you might as well have parked it in the designated spot by now.
Where I am, large enough stores have dedicated "outside" employees, most of whose time is be spent pushing carts. For them it's not a fun change of pace, it's just their job. If everyone put their carts back in an orderly fashion, they would need to do less weaving in parking lot traffic and trudging through horrible weather than they otherwise have to. Sure, "it's their job", but I don't want to make it even harder, especially considering how much they tend to be paid.
There's a pretty fundamental difference between additional low priority but necessary busy work for a salaried employee and one of the better tasks you get to do as a min-wage retail employee.
Back when I worked in retail, my car was dented multiple times from people not putting carts in the designated areas.
Sometimes you can't park without getting out of the car to clean up after other people, because carts are littering the parking spaces. (Including being pushed from adjacent spots into handicap spaces.)
I've parked near corrals and had people half-ass push them next to it, effectively double parking me until I removed several carts.
I've had to jump out of the way of carts being whipped down an aisle by a strong wind in a storm.
Nobody's talking about bringing carts back to the building, but doing the bare minimum of putting them in the corrals. Failing to do so is saying you value your minor convenience over other peoples' time, property and health. Tucking them on a curb is saying you know you're doing a bad thing but don't really care.
Same re: grocery work and liking getting carts as a teen.
That said
> But if they just push it into the grass, or out of the way,
One marker of whether something is acceptable in society(or having a functioning brain, at times) is to ask oneself "what would happen if everyone did what I'm doing." This applies to most things...littering, talking on speakerphone or blasting music in public, etc. I think this example would similarly fail this test, imagining hundreds of carts piled up somewhere 'out of the way.'
If everyone did it then you'd probably have a dedicated person to fetch the carts doing that basically throughout their shift. The store still needs the carts for more shoppers and with everyone putting them in the grass that process ends up taking longer.
Except for particularly busy times, I don't think you'd see major pile ups.
But I generally agree with what you are saying. It's a valuable question to ask "what if everyone did this".
Yeah and if everyone was littering all the time, the city might employ more dustmen. Or they would say screw it, why waste money and time, when the citizens obviously don't want to live in a clean city.
Ah yes. It's pouring rain, blowing cold wind in your face, kids are screaming and hitting each other, you stubbed your toe into cart and generally just having bad day. What would jesus do?
Is the standard to return the cart or not? Where do you draw the line? What if it’s only raining? How hard does it need to be raining to sacrifice your principles?
On days with a strong wind it is more important to rerun the cart, because leaving it loose will mean it’s likely to hit someone’s car. This is when the golden rule comes into play.
I've had bad days. I still managed not to be a net negative on my environment. Why can't you? Why can't other people? From my perspective, how you behave when you're having a bad day is the real litmus test. If you're still a decent person then, then you actually have values you care about, that you don't just follow when convenient.
Theoretically, in this case, the agonizing "It's pouring rain, blowing cold wind in your face, kids are screaming and hitting each other, you stubbed your toe into cart and generally just having bad day" scenario making any man unable to manage the extra-harrowing effort of directing a cart a few meters into a designated space.
I feel like the recent and strange habit of people telling me, unprompted, all about their assorted minor medical maladies, syndromes, and treatments -- is a form of "I don't always do the right thing because of these tribulations that I suffer"
Like it's pre-loading being an asshole. I hate it. Have your bad day in a way that doesn't continue the dominoes falling and causing other bad days, however much misery loves company.
I worked at a grocery store as well and we didn’t even have a place to return carts. Even after I got moved up to doing stock, I told the manager I’d be happy to go get carts, especially in the winter when no one else wanted to do it. I thought it was fun to go out there and slide around on them.
We had some woods and a little stream next to the parking lot. Some people would chuck the carts into the woods. That’s probably considered bad behavior, but for me, that was just more time I could spend outside and a little adventure to fetch the cart and get it back up the hill through the trees.
I could see working at a big store where you’re expected to bring in 50 carts at a time to be annoying. I was at a smaller places and would only bring in 5 or 6 at a time. Some of the managers would get annoyed at that, but I was getting minimum wage and was the only person who didn’t complain about the cold and snow, so they could just deal with my pace. I wanted to make sure I could control what I was pushing, so I didn’t hurt anyone or break anything. We don’t even have a rope, like I see most places have now.
I talked to a guy who used to run a grocery store. There were low-income housing apartment buildings nearby. People would walk to the store, buy groceries, and then just roll the damn carts back to their buildings down the street.
Sounds terrible but the owner didn't mind, or at least didn't discourage it. Those people didn't have cars and if they had to carry groceries home by hand they'd just buy less groceries or perhaps not shop there at all. He would just drive a pickup truck to the apartment building at the end of the day to collect carts.
When he began the story I thought it was about to be a racist story about "low-income" people (bit of a barely-disguised dog whistle there) but it wound up being pretty cool. An ad-hoc system that worked to everybody's benefit.
As a fellow former grocery store employee, I can agree about the “break up the monotony” concept from the narrow POV of the bored worker.
It is an inconvenience though, even if as insignificant as an eyesore for others, or the landscaper who may need to remove shopping carts from the planter to do their work.
You could apply similar logic to people who carelessly throw trash in the recycling bin or on a sidewalk where it’s someone else’s job to clean up after them. I’ve seen people go as far as to say they are graciously “providing a job” for someone else when they throw their refuse in the recycling bin.
The fact that the shopping carts are such an inconsequential thing to shrug off is what makes them a great litmus test — will you do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do, even when there is so little at stake
> I’ve seen people go as far as to say they are graciously “providing a job” for someone else when they throw their refuse in the recycling bin.
The great thing about the “job creation” theory of antisocial behavior is that it justifies all kinds of things, from graffiti to dumping to stealing decorative plants from the local park. Why bother following implicit (or even explicit) rules if there is no consequence? Surely it won’t have any consequences in the long run!
It takes 30 seconds to return a cart. Nobody is so busy or has so many kids as to not be able to wheel the cart into the cart stall. If you have that many kids, then you probably can't really safely grocery shop in the first place.
The reason it gets brought up is exactly because it's a small thing to do that is generally accepted as being the right thing to do. You basically won't find someone defending not wheeling back the cart as being the right thing to do (outside of maybe a true emergency).
If you have kids, you let them return the cart, because it is fun for them and already start to move the car out of the parking lot. That way you save even more time.
The workers, drivers, and potentially future shoppers.
>I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts.
You're getting the carts either way. I won't speak to if it helps to give you more time to yourself when collecting wayward carts, but there is some built in time for collections even with "good shoppers".
> if someone leaves their cart in a parking spot... well that is bad behavior
Yes, hence the shopping cart theory.
I'm not a perfect person but try to keep it out of parking those times I am tired. But I recognize that carts can still roll into the lot or that it increases risks of a future car who comes in.
This isn't exclusively about whether it inconveniences employees or not. I was also a grocery store worker and I would also enjoy cart getting in certain weather but I wouldn't want to do it at, for example, walmart. That's practically a contact sport.
No, this is simply about can people do small things to make the system better. Things that cost them essentially nothing but make the world work.
I hold a strong but unproven belief that a minority of people who are naturally more conscientious than ordinary are basically holding the world together at the seams.
I have the inverted belief that most people are actually doing all right most of the time, but it's the squeaky wheels that stand out from the crowd and draw my attention all day long. There's just too many man-hours elapsed per day for a true minority to keep it stumbling along as gracefully as it does. We all have our bad days.
I've spent a lot of time cleaning up and observing a small strip of sidewalk in front of a retail establishment in a city and I've come to believe in a variation of the broken windows theory. If I let the sidewalk become too messy, or if I remove the trash but not the dead leaves in the fall then more trash will appear at a seemingly exponential rate. If I do a thorough job cleaning the entire area and removing all debris, however, it stays tidy for many hours, sometimes even days. I don't believe for one second that keeping the area tidy prevents people from littering there. I think the people who would drop their candy wrapper are going to do it anyway, but I think there are many people who, while walking through my tidy section of sidewalk, bend over and pick up the candy wrapper when they see it. I just think they don't bother when there's two or three candy wrappers, thus causing the observed effect.
The tragedy of the commons isn’t that most people take such good care of the commons. I bet people see your tidy walk and feel guilty about messing it up.
Somebody's got to, and I've got a little extra time, so I guess I will.
Burns off the karma from being a trouble maker on IRC (sorry Undernet). Although doing things to burn karma just generates karma for doing good things for the wrong reasons.
I did not usually see a free roaming cart though. Maybe times have changed. Usually, people would prop them up against a curb, or ditch them into a grassy spot, or they would put them by a low spot in the parking lot next to a drain, or put them next to a column on the sidewalk.
Just my anecdotal experience, it seemed like people would put their cart back if there was a cart corral in the center of every parking row.
Walmarts around me seem to have a corral every ten or so cars, hordes of them. I still encounter strays and that’s with them seeming having a dedicated cart cowboy (with his little train).
I once calculated the number of carts Walmart has worldwide and it was mind-boggling.
Are kids really the excuse? I was putting away the cart basically as early as I remember. It was extremely fun to do that as a kid. Ride the cart like a kick scooter then BANG slam it into the rack with the others.
I’ve noticed very few kids doing little chores like this these days. Maybe I just don’t notice it. Maybe it’s a sign of a wider rot regarding parenting. Maybe it’s nothing.
Actually glad to hear that. I always wondered if it was pure entitlement and laziness to walk past a loaded corral and then take a car at the entrance.
I also feel many feel (irrationally) that they are being ripped off by the store and thus won’t bother to return the cart out of spite.
Imagine, if you will, a society where it had become commonplace and normal for people to throw their trash on the ground, and there were people who were expected as part of their working duties to pick up this trash and put it in a wastebin. It wouldn’t really matter whether the worker minded this duty, or whether it was commonly accepted behavior, or whether it was a bit inconvenient to dispose of the trash properly, or whether the person was a bit busy. Some people, probably those raised a certain way, would automatically intuit that there is something wrong with this and throw out their own garbage. They might even pick up one or two pieces others had left behind, too. But who is really being inconvenienced?
When employees are forced to spend time collecting carts prices at the store go up . Customers are the ones being inconvenienced by higher prices when people abandon their carts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems to be different in the USA, but here they wouldn't. If somebody would abandon a shopping cart, it would stay there indefinitely until somebody returns it. I mean the employee might do it after work, on there way home, but also only for the same reason any other random person would do it.
The employees arent there to have fun. When customers create work for the store they need to spend more on wages and prices go up. The shopping cart theory isnt about the employees, its about making the whole system a little bit worse for everyone else.
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.
>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.
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".
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."
>“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.”