If you scatter carts in random places the supermarket has to employ someone to collect them. So you are a job creatorTM. This is why I never return my cart, and also why I jump on cartons of milk in the dairy aisle and take a dump in the broccoli.
Nice thing about working class parents… when you’re a kid and think “but it’s someone’s job, they get paid to do it,” they will teach you that it has nothing to do with making more work for someone.
People who actually think this are using it as an excuse for their bad manners.
The person employed by the supermarket to gather carts is not employed to return your cart to the cart return near your vehicle. They are employed to gather the carts from the cart return near your vehicle and bring them back to the store building’s cart return.
By doing this, you do not create more jobs (as the cart return employee position already exists whether you return your cart or not), you create more work for an already probably underpaid employee and you also increase everyone’s autoinsurance because when the wind blows the carts damage other people’s vehicles.
OK, you got me, I actually always return my cart and seldom shit in the broccoli.
… But what about the milk?
That information is classified. But you’ll know it when you see/smell it.
I definitely have the unpopular opinion of disagreeing. As much as I’d like to employ manners with my grocery store, if there’s no corral within a 30 second walk from me, I don’t put the cart back. Most of my purchases are under 8 items and I usually don’t use a cart so I just carry everything by hand in the store and out.
My grocery store doesn’t care about manners on their end. It treats me like an economic unit and even makes self checkout the most reasonable option. They’d have me clean the floors as part of the checkout if they could. From a utilitarian perspective, it makes more sense for one person to gather all the carts in a batch rather than each individual going back for their individual cart.
The insurance rates thing is a legitimate point ( insurance is a racket, though. Fuck those guys too)
“They don’t have good manners, so I won’t have good manners” is a terrible way of thinking and living. If everyone did this, it would only take one person to completely eradicate good manners from humanity forever.
Yeah I see your point and I’ve got amazing manners with human beings. It’s a view I personally reserve for companies. And the larger they are, the less I respect them enough to have ‘manners’ towards them.
Perhaps it’s the inability for people to treat corporations the way corporations treat people that leads to such a power differential.
From a utilitarian perspective
Pretty sure that’s not what utilitarianism means lol
I actually use this rationale for why I don’t use the self-checkout lanes. Why should I do the work for the grocery store that they should be paying somebody else to do?
My local supermarket added 8 self checkout machines, and removed almost all the cashier lanes.
For a year, they pushed everyone towards the self checkout. Every… Body. Old people were clogging up the Customer Service section because they want a human. The machines constantly failed to scan, and people would just shrug and pretend like it did.
The deviants started to realize it’s super easy to steal, as they can just pay for 1/10 of their groceries and “forget” to scan a lot of things. They started to lock up a lot of merchandise, and you need a human to unlock it.
So now they have hired security guards to then scan receipts, as well as follow people in the parking lots.
The whole supermarket is kind of a shit show. I counted 5 security guards to 2 workers when I was last there. I also do my shopping elsewhere.
You return your cart because it’s the right thing to do
I return my cart because it gives me a sense of superiority
We are not the same
I straighten them because they annoy me lol.
I’m also a cart-straightener
Blows my mind how some people actually manage to walk their cart to the corral, and then decide they’re going to abandon any semblance of order in putting the carts away, you’ve already done the hard part by walking over, it takes less than a second to just not be an idiot when you push your cart in there.
Big carts in one line, small carts in the other, seems easy but they all put the square peg in the round hole.
And at least try to line them up. I don’t care if you push them all the way in, just try to line them up so that they can be pushed together.
You return your cart because it’s the right thing to do
I return my cart to get my euro back that I put in to unlock it
Mr fancy pants here with full euro coins.
I treasure my red plastic €0.50 coin replica more than my life.
I put in a 2€ and look down on other shoppers
Don’t be a lazybones folks!
No one will punish you for not returning the cart
My opinion on this is reason number 8735 why I will never, and should never, be in charge of a country.
That goes for everything you can return but don’t have to. You can throw your trash away after the movie, you don’t have to leave it in the theatre.
I’ve always told my family I like to build up “cart karma.” You get karma by bringing a cart in with you from the parking lot, or returning the one you use after. You lose karma by leaving your cart in the parking lot. Even if I’m going in for a single item, I’ll take a cart in from the parking lot with me and leave it in the rack by the store.
I don’t really care about cart karma, it’s just a way of saying that it seems like the nice thing to do.
st peter at the pearly gates: “yup, looks like you’re up 14 carts overall. welcome to heaven.”
Nope, I don’t buy it.
- An estimated one out of every 500 Americans is homeless
- Unarmed noncombatant civilian women and children are being bombed, shot, and starved to death.
- There has been a nearly 70% reduction in wild vertebrates worldwide since 1970
- The leading cause of death among children and teens in america is firearms
Privileged westerners could do something about these things, but they are sipping their pumpkin spice lattes and congratulating each other for putting their shopping carts back because, you know, it’s the ultimate test of moral righteousness. Ugh.
I bet you’re fun at parties.
Another possibility is that people that don’t return the cart may not be having their needs met. A person who is tired after walking across the hot parking lot may not return it out of a desire to maintain a modicum of health. Or, perhaps, they may not think about it because their cognition is temporarily hindered by hunger, exhaustion, or some other carnal need.
On Maslow’s hierarchy, I’d say if a person meets all of their physiological and safety needs they are more likely to return the cart than those who do not.
If they’re so tired after walking around the shop and walking back to their car that they can’t do that tiny bit more and return the cart to the corral, maybe they should be seeing a doctor to see if they are eligible for disability (sounds like a severe case of lazybonesitis) and use a handicapped spot. Or you know, stop being so fucking lazy and making excuses.
