Are you a good person?
December 14, 2021 12:24 PM Subscribe

There’s an easy way to tell, according to the internet at least, and it’s based on what you do with a shopping cart when you are done with it. If you put it in the designated shopping cart collection area in the parking lot, you’re good. If you leave it to drift off into parking spots, you’re bad. ... for a date you need to take them to a restaurant and do the waiter test & then later go to the store with them & do the shopping cart test.
posted by dancestoblue (263 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite

I think the shopping cart test might show if someone is a bad person but is inconclusive about whether they are a good one. Everyone I see puts their shopping carts away and I'm pretty sure they aren't all good people.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:29 PM on December 14, 2021 [33 favorites]

I used to love this rubric until someone pointed out how deeply ableist it is.
posted by lunasol at 12:30 PM on December 14, 2021 [94 favorites]

What if you bring your shopping cart all the way back to the spot in the store where they belong?
posted by guiseroom at 12:31 PM on December 14, 2021 [11 favorites]

I used to love this rubric until someone pointed out how deeply ableist it is.

And how much it selects against parents as well.
posted by Xoder at 12:36 PM on December 14, 2021 [29 favorites]

I put the cart in the cart corral, but I deliberately park as close as possible to the corral to minimize the effort this will take.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:37 PM on December 14, 2021 [28 favorites]

My favorite grocery store has no outside shopping cart parking. In order to be a good person you must bring it all the way back inside the store. In almost 30 years I have literally never seen a cart abandoned in the parking lot. I have no idea what this means.
posted by HotToddy at 12:39 PM on December 14, 2021 [10 favorites]

And how much it selects against parents as well.

Why can't parents put shopping carts away?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:41 PM on December 14, 2021 [85 favorites]

I think the real test is which people will ask about the undefined waiter test versus those that pretend they know.
posted by hypnogogue at 12:41 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

You're a bad person if you abandon a shopping cart? Who are these people, fucking ecommerce consultants?
posted by phooky at 12:43 PM on December 14, 2021 [53 favorites]

I think you're a good person if you can recall the Stray Shopping Cart Identification System code for a given cart from memory. Wait, what's the other word besides good...
posted by credulous at 12:44 PM on December 14, 2021 [7 favorites]

I would put policing doggie poo in this same category, especially when there are bags and a receptacle nearby. Most prevalent in apartment life...
posted by jim in austin at 12:44 PM on December 14, 2021 [5 favorites]

Everyone I see puts their shopping carts away

Where is this magical place of which you speak?
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:47 PM on December 14, 2021 [11 favorites]

What's the waiter test?
posted by nushustu at 12:48 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

And how much it selects against parents as well.

what is even the point of having kids if you can't make them do dumb shit like put the cart away and shovel the walk?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:48 PM on December 14, 2021 [50 favorites]

And how much it selects against parents as well.

you mean parents who don't park next to the cart return.
posted by Dr. Twist at 12:48 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

What if you shop at Aldi and you have to return your cart or you don't get your quarter back?
posted by Cash4Lead at 12:51 PM on December 14, 2021 [11 favorites]

I'll normally take them back to the cart corral, and sometimes will end up reordering the corral if there are different cart sizes where someone has tried to jam a small cart into a large cart etc. Unless I have my kids in the car with me and we've parked a long way from the corral.....then I'm all about where the cart can go that it won't be in the way / so it can hang out with other wayward carts like Goth Kids behind the bike sheds. Goth Carts.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 12:51 PM on December 14, 2021 [22 favorites]

I always put the shopping cart away to try to prevent people from noticing what a tremendous piece of shit I am, myth BUSTED.
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 12:52 PM on December 14, 2021 [48 favorites]

Also: littering.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 12:53 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

Hard to get your kid to put the cart away when they’re still in diapers.

Hard to do a lot of things when your kid’s still in diapers. Including leaving them in the car alone for a minute while you put the cart away.

Also, as someone with a variety of mobility challenges, this metric can fuck right off.
posted by Sublimity at 12:54 PM on December 14, 2021 [43 favorites]

That thing about the car door has always pissed me off. Try being 5' tall, dressed up in unreasonably restrictive women's fancy clothes, and being picked up in some guy's land yacht of a car in the 1980s. You will quickly conclude that this is an unreasonable expectation.
posted by HotToddy at 1:01 PM on December 14, 2021 [16 favorites]

A big chain grocery store near me is on one of the local bus lines, which serves a nearby less-affluent part of town where the same big chain closed one of their stores 10 years ago, creating a food desert for the subset of the population without an automobile.

Every week, there are dozens of shopping carts piled up next to the bus stop because a large chunk of the store's clientele (many of them elderly/disabled/both) have to take the bus to get there, and don't have a single approved spot to put their shopping carts. The unsightly clutter could be addressed by the store if they put some extra shopping cart corrals near the bus stop, or by lobbying the city to put the bus stop closer to the store entrance, but they haven't. It's a clear case of a badly designed and maintained system, not "bad people".
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:02 PM on December 14, 2021 [62 favorites]

The shopping cart test is pretty clearly meant as a tongue-in-cheek heuristic to indicate whether people clean up after themselves or blithely create more work for others to do and may not withstand strict philosophical scrutiny.
posted by crosley at 1:02 PM on December 14, 2021 [132 favorites]

What about people who look beyond immediate, visible, performative "good" and think that, by leaving a shopping cart out in a parking lot, they are helping assure that at least some jobs are less disposable? Especially if they're conscientious about putting the cart somewhere it won't roll and hit a car or person? Especially if they do this while _knowing_ that some people will judge them for it -- and they opt for greater, long-term good anyway, despite the personal cost?

As a person who had to go fetch shopping carts as part of their job for a long, long time I can tell you that your that personal cost to you was mis-spent. people who fetch shopping carts for a living have 1000 other things to do besides fetching carts.
posted by Dr. Twist at 1:04 PM on December 14, 2021 [109 favorites]

Hard to do a lot of things when your kid’s still in diapers. Including leaving them in the car alone for a minute while you put the cart away.

You strap them into the car seat, and then return the cart. Worked through two kids, they still around.

BTW, I used to work (temporarily) at a grocery store that had carts, and (maybe because my boss sucked) I always considered gathering carts from anywhere the least bad part of the job, as long as the weather wasn't dreadful. You get a few minutes in the sun without anyone bothering you and since you are outside, you can choose how long it takes for yourself.

So I'm a returner, but no judgment on anyone that doesn't.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:04 PM on December 14, 2021 [20 favorites]

Like inflateablwiki, I am a cart corral tidier and re-arranger. I find it satisfying when things are in their proper place and ok, it makes me feel like an EVEN GOODER person. Of course that one time I could not be bothered and just thought what is WRONG with people, jammed my cart into the mess, threw up my hands and walked away... THAT'S the time my kid remembers.
posted by evilmomlady at 1:05 PM on December 14, 2021 [13 favorites]

Everyone I see puts their shopping carts away

Where is this magical place of which you speak?

North and East suburbs of Toronto. Pre-pandemic at least half of the grocery stores made you put a quarter/loonie in to take your cart so I think people got conditioned by that to put their carts away to get their money back. Right now grocery stores aren't doing the deposit but I guess it's just as hard to break good habits as it is to break bad ones.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:06 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

As a person who uses almost exclusively a basket, I was doomed from the start
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:07 PM on December 14, 2021 [13 favorites]

What if they put the cart away, but leave the toilet seat up?
posted by njohnson23 at 1:09 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

I used to deliberately shove the carts out into the mostly empty lot and watch them roll downhill to crash spectacularly into the curb at the bottom of the lot, the rear hinged section flipping briefly upward on impact.
I stopped doing that after I released a cart with a strong starboard list and it crashed into the one other car in the lot.
I don’t go shopping at 2am these days, so I no longer have empty downhill lots to shove carts into anyway.
I return the carts to the little mid-lot cart shuttle ports where they gather them up, if one is close, or to the store entry, if it’s closer.
But I miss rolling them into the free downhill night of the empty lot.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 1:10 PM on December 14, 2021 [10 favorites]

I work big box retail, so I am that person who brings a cart or two in as I walk in from parking. I am forever doomed to front shelves and ask people if I can help them find something, etc. I also did teller work one summer, so I am forever counting money "teller-style". That's me: forever programmed.

People who can spend time shopping around a store pushing a cart, yet leave the cart centered in an open parking spot upon filling their car have little excuse. How many times have you started towards an open spot only to find a cart in it; or worse, come out to find someone's abandoned cart has smacked into your car?

Many stores offer to help load if that's a problem for customers (with no questions asked.) If you don't want to leave your children in the car unattended for a minute, if you have mobility or other issues, then pull up to the store to load, or ask for help loading. Retail is BIG on service nowadays. Ask for help.

Don't think that by leaving the cart unattended, you're helping employ some poor soul. We don't have enough staff. Ever. Our "loaders" are both 80+ years old (I am not exaggerating) and still working because they need the money, but would prefer to not have to round up the carts left all over the place. They cannot keep up with just the standard loading help and cart corrals.
posted by mightshould at 1:11 PM on December 14, 2021 [81 favorites]

I worked at a series of grocery stores in high school in college, and collecting carts is a favorite task among staff. It sucks, but at least it sucks outside and you're not having to deal with customers or restocking the freezer section. Of course, you'd be grouching the entire time "why can't these selfish idiots bring their carts back or at least corral them?" But then, you'd remember that thanks to them just leaving them wherever they want, you get to be outside for a few minutes every few hours with no manager telling you to hurry up or a customer complaining that yes, we need your ID to accept a check. That said, I still always put my cart back.
posted by General Malaise at 1:12 PM on December 14, 2021 [11 favorites]

Hey, Dr. Twist, I didn't say it was me. I can't resist adding to the orderliness of the world by putting carts where carts go :) But the self-checkout lanes freak me the heck out, as does the still, lonely atmosphere inside the nearest Michael's.
posted by amtho at 1:13 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

What mightshould said.

Also, people that intentionally leave carts in random places to facilitate job security for cart wrangler jobs deserve to be shanked in the parking lot and bleed out while face down in discarded bubblegum...
posted by schyler523 at 1:15 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

Seriously, though, what's the WAITER TEST?
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 1:19 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I live in a town where the beloved, sort of upscale community Co-Op is located next door to the chain grocery store. There are plenty of crossover customers (I'm among them). But they have two different parking lots, kind of, because they are located on two different sides of the building. Co-op lot is free of abandoned shopping cards. Chain grocery store full of them. And, like, I'm not saying I think the co-op shoppers are better people (they/we're not) . I do, however, think the co-op shoppers have more stock in being perceived as better people and, for better or worse, that makes a difference.
posted by thivaia at 1:19 PM on December 14, 2021 [5 favorites]

theyre nice to u but mean to the waiter

That's all. That's not a damn test tho
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 1:20 PM on December 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

On Reddit, a user laid out a very detailed description of the theory...

The link is -- and I'd think this would be super obvious to the writer -- a 4chan post, re-posted to Reddit. Does the reputation of that source change the way we feel about the idea? Should it?

What does it say about a person if they lazily dump ties to 4chan just any old place in the middle of an essay, rather than trudging all the way back to the proper attribution corral?
posted by Western Infidels at 1:21 PM on December 14, 2021 [13 favorites]

What if you shop at Aldi and you have to return your cart or you don't get your quarter back?

What if you shop at Aldi and you give the cart to someone entering with quarter attached and a "pay it foward?"
posted by joeyh at 1:22 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

I think the waiter test is a decent judge of character, more than the shopping cart. There can be a myriad of reasons why you can't/won't return a cart. But if you're an asshole to the server, you're an asshole.
posted by Ber at 1:22 PM on December 14, 2021 [37 favorites]

Most of the time I don't even use a cart, I just use one of those baskety things. Although I do try to put it in the rack by the registers when I'm done.

> Hard to do a lot of things when your kid’s still in diapers. Including leaving them in the car alone for a minute while you put the cart away.

You strap them into the car seat, and then return the cart. Worked through two kids, they still around.

can we not get into this please
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:23 PM on December 14, 2021 [11 favorites]

The waiter test is "is this person rude to the waiter (a stranger playing a subservient social role)?" If yes, the person is determined to be "a dick"
posted by crosley at 1:24 PM on December 14, 2021 [8 favorites]

If you can push the cart into the parking lot, you can push it back to the store.

The worst fight I ever saw in a parking lot started when a mom unloaded the groceries before taking out the baby, the cart rolled away, hit a cart that had been left, and both rolled into another mother-baby combo. The moms started screaming at each other, the second mom somehow convinced that the first mom had deliberately rolled the carts into her. One cart, misfortune, two carts, carelessness. The babies began toddling away, which is where I stepped in because it didn’t seem like a great idea to let babies wander freely in a parking lot. I wrangled the babies, the security guard pulled the moms apart, and some kind of peace returned to Trader Joe’s. If the second cart hadn’t been there, it’s possible mom 2 would have had empathy for mom 1’s situation.

The moral of this story is obvious. Trader Joe’s has the worst parking lots.
posted by betweenthebars at 1:26 PM on December 14, 2021 [36 favorites]

Asking for a friend: what if you rolled the cart down the Exorcist stairs in Georgetown? Nobody on the stairs.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 1:27 PM on December 14, 2021 [9 favorites]

What about people who look beyond immediate, visible, performative "good" and think that, by leaving a shopping cart out in a parking lot, they are helping assure that at least some jobs are less disposable? Especially if they're conscientious about putting the cart somewhere it won't roll and hit a car or person? Especially if they do this while _knowing_ that some people will judge them for it -- and they opt for greater, long-term good anyway, despite the personal cost?

Isn't this Stephen Miller's rationale for littering?
posted by LionIndex at 1:28 PM on December 14, 2021 [14 favorites]

Many stores offer to help load if that's a problem for customers (with no questions asked.) If you don't want to leave your children in the car unattended for a minute, if you have mobility or other issues, then pull up to the store to load, or ask for help loading. Retail is BIG on service nowadays. Ask for help.

Retail is big on service? We're in the middle of a retail labor shortage. I wouldn't dream of asking a retail worker for anything "extra" these days. They're run off their feet as it is and many of their employers won't pay enough to get the staff they need.

Before I developed fibromyalgia, I felt the same way about a lot of this. If someone can wheel the cart around the supermarket, can't they wheel it to their car, and then to the corral? What I didn't understand is that ability is not black and white. When I'm in a flare, I can often summon the energy and muscle to do the errand, but by the end of the errand, I may be completely exhausted and/or in pain. I do always put my cart back because I will feel guilty if I don't, but I wouldn't blame someone else in my position for not doing it.

And man, if you have an invisible disability, it's really hard to ask for help. I went to my first post-Covid live music event at a club this weekend. A friend encouraged me to ask ahead of time about ADA accommodations, since I haven't been to a live show at a club (ie, without guaranteed seating) since my diagnosis. I did just that, and they reserved a spot on the bench near the stage for me. Which was awesome! But when I got there, a bunch of people were standing near it and GLARED at me when I sat down. They weren't even using it! This may seem tangential, but there's definitely a fear of seeming lazy or entitled. And I can see how someone would just not want to have to deal with that.

I don't know, I'm also just so tired of glib online morality tests. Maybe this is just supposed to be a joke, but clearly people are taking it seriously, and some people clearly feel annoyed to have the ability issue brought up. But maybe we don't need to spend so much time passing judgments about the moral goodness or badness of hypothetical strangers? Maybe instead we could be curious about things like why people don't return grocery carts and, if it is indeed a huge problem, then work on ways to fix it?
posted by lunasol at 1:29 PM on December 14, 2021 [43 favorites]

I'm in Chile. The "good" people are the ones who don't stick their shopping cart behind your car so now it's your problem and fuck you.
posted by signal at 1:32 PM on December 14, 2021 [8 favorites]

I bet someone in ten years will be reading this and saying to themselves:

"Hmm, can't believe we even had to return shopping carts! C'mon, let's go cartie."

And they'll continue browsing on their phone as their autonomous Amazon Fresh shopping cart follows behind them.
posted by FJT at 1:33 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

The grocery store parking lot is indeed fraught with peril, as Edith Bunker can attest.
posted by JanetLand at 1:38 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

And they'll continue browsing on their phone as their autonomous Amazon Fresh ~~shopping cart~~ gig worker follows behind them.
posted by chortly at 1:38 PM on December 14, 2021 [9 favorites]

Metafilter: trudging all the way back to the proper attribution corral
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:38 PM on December 14, 2021 [7 favorites]

How did this thread get so far without a link to Cart Narcs?
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:38 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

People like to talk shit online because there's nothing else to do but I doubt people are really scoping out what actual individuals are doing in actual parking lots and making actual judgments on them. And if they are then those people also have little to do. Putting the cart back is good for a little brain reward hit in addition to making one thing a little easier for one person that day.
posted by bleep at 1:39 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

Wait so...because the world is bad, fuck the grocery employees?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:43 PM on December 14, 2021 [17 favorites]

But you're also a bad person for using exploitative delivery services, so I guess we should all just starve to death in our houses, eh.
posted by bleep at 1:43 PM on December 14, 2021 [15 favorites]

I mean fine yes, everyone is terrible, all of us, 100000 percent of the time OK, I do in fact actually agree. What does NOT then follow, is that we should deliberately be worse to others than is necessary.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:45 PM on December 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

The reason I put the cart back is it's like you get to go bowling, in public, without renting funny shoes.
posted by joeyh at 1:49 PM on December 14, 2021 [24 favorites]

But you're also a bad person for using exploitative delivery services, so I guess we should all just starve to death in our houses, eh.

No, we must all be hale and hearty, strong of limb, hefting our goods from the market on foot, goods that are perfectly calibrated to feed our families without an ounce of excess. Feeling the rain on our rosy, healthful, anticapitalist faces! There are literally no barriers to this that I can see.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:50 PM on December 14, 2021 [46 favorites]

Now you see I will be flying down this hill to end in the muddy, swirling river. I ride this shopping cart, and it is not meaningless transport. The rich use for consumption, with tomatoes and steak; the poor for production with collections of bottles and cans, and the artist for chaos, with the artist himself inside and these angry unknown rodents. We will see how it happens. Please light us on fire now, so we have the poetry. Push me, Kinski, now!

posted by maudlin at 1:54 PM on December 14, 2021 [14 favorites]

Back in the before times, a homeless guy outside my local Sainsburys would politely volunteer to help people pack all their groceries into the car and then take the trolley back to the storage rack for them. Many shoppers were happy to take him up on this, knowing his reward would be the £1 deposit coin each trolley contained.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:55 PM on December 14, 2021 [12 favorites]

Yes, finally, a heuristic to determine someone's morality - not at all a way to loudly announce to the internet about the tedious labor you perform that somehow never elicited the congratulations you secretly thought you've always deserved.
posted by bookwo3107 at 1:56 PM on December 14, 2021 [22 favorites]

I often don't put my shopping cart back when I get groceries. I leave it in the striped part of the handicapped spot I park in. Which I am explicitly entitled to do by store policy.

I am someone with a limited number of spoons. I can just barely take care of myself and my mother. A spoon used for taking a cart back (and more importantly coming back to the car with nothing to lean on) is maybe a shower I can't take, or some dishes I can't do.

I would love to order grocery delivery (LOVE to not have to lug groceries up the steps), but it is both expensive and unreliable. The one time we tried Instacart, they marked it as delivered but it was nowhere to be found, and endless stressful chats with support require more spoons.

I think the real point is you shouldn't make snap judgements of people. It's comforting to think the world is easy to parse, but it's not. It's lazy and uncompassionate to judge someone on so little information.

There's all sorts of snapshots you could take of me, some of which would show me in a positive light and some that wouldn't. I have volunteered a bunch. I've fostered kittens. I've been there for friends and family when they needed me, including quitting a job and moving across the country. It's upsetting to know that people may reduce me to a bad person because they glanced at me one day in a parking lot and saw me not putting my cart back.
posted by Flock of Cynthiabirds at 1:56 PM on December 14, 2021 [37 favorites]

Incidentally, "face down in discarded bubblegum" is my new sockpuppet name.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:58 PM on December 14, 2021 [5 favorites]

What if everyone returns the carts 95% of their trips and doesn't the 5% of the trips they are in a hurry but self-identify as cart returners? Seriously, I think that's about my ratio, and it's offset by the % of the time I get my cart from the farthest corner of the parking lot before I got into the store.

As for returning plastic handbaskets after self-checkout, I do or do not depending if there is already a stack at the self checkout, but I've started deliberately not returning baskets at stores where the baskets are sanitized by employees as part of the anti-covid strategy.
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:04 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

If you buy more than you can carry and drive to the store, you're a bad person. Or a person who has been forced to be bad by economic circumstance. Leaving the cart in a non-designated place is a tiny amount of work for someone whose job is retrieving carts. Driving to the store is a large part of why the world is awful.

Try being the person who can't drive, walked to the store, and realizes too late you bought too much stuff than you can possibly carry and have to steal the cart to bring it all home.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:10 PM on December 14, 2021 [5 favorites]

This being the year 2021, there is also the indoor mask use in a public space test: is it a real mask, covering the mouth and nose?

I wouldn't say that everyone who passes is good, but everyone who fails is 100% garbage.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:12 PM on December 14, 2021 [20 favorites]

Picture it, college town, 2010 ish, a middle aged white woman approaches me, a young 20s white woman. She is pushing a cart, and says "Oh, do you need a cart for the grocery store?" I say, "No thank you." She says, "Well, can you take it for me?" and shoves it my way and walks away. I then return it to the cart coral. She's clearly an asshole.

I'm also a disabled person. I think in the cart circumstance, the test turns into whether your friend, date, or partner will assist you in returning the cart. Not whether they judge you about your ability to return the cart. And in the grand scheme, I still think the point is about the people who CAN but DON'T. Disabled people often do their best, and if we can't return it, I'm sure we try to put it out of the way. I don't think this is about that.
posted by Crystalinne at 2:13 PM on December 14, 2021 [10 favorites]

Yeah, I must live near jenfullmoon - I push the carts all the way home. If anyone needs a cart, come on by.
posted by PhineasGage at 2:13 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

So is this a trolly problem?
posted by gwint at 2:16 PM on December 14, 2021 [50 favorites]

From a utilitarian perspective, (buys beans + leaves cart out) > (buys steak + puts cart back). I do some of all four of the above.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 2:17 PM on December 14, 2021

So is this a trolly problem?

not rolly
posted by lalochezia at 2:23 PM on December 14, 2021 [8 favorites]

You don't need a shopping cart, or a waiter.
...
Sonny: Listen to me, kid. If she doesn't reach over and lift up that button so that you can get in, that means she's a selfish broad and all you're seeing is the tip of the iceberg. You dump her and you dump her fast.
...you just need a really old car.
posted by clawsoon at 2:24 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

All I know is, if you’re the one who leaves your shopping cart in the alley behind my apartment, you are history’s greatest monster.
posted by rodlymight at 2:24 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I used to work at a grocery store. One of my favorite jobs was running down all the loose shopping carts. It got me outside where there was sunlight, fresh air, no muzak, and no people asking me to do things. I'll admit I'm grumpy when people block parking spaces in a crowded parking lot with carts, but why do you think the workers care about getting the carts? They get paid by the hour!
posted by aspo at 2:28 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

So is this a trolly problem?

This was the meme I was introduced to it by
posted by little onion at 2:30 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I know someone who is making amends to someone she can no longer contact by gathering a few shopping carts in the parking lots where she shops and putting them in the corral. This has gone on for a few years now. The recipient of said amends has no idea she does this, and I have no idea why amends were warranted.
posted by waving at 2:32 PM on December 14, 2021 [7 favorites]

It puts the shopping cart in the basket
posted by clavdivs at 2:32 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

(That said I still put the carts back because you can stand on the back of an empty cart and push with one foot and go WHEEE! down the parking lot lanes real fast and that's the most fun part of grocery shopping.)
posted by aspo at 2:36 PM on December 14, 2021 [8 favorites]

Wow, I had no idea people felt so strongly about cart return.

I always return my cart except for when I go to Pricerite, which doesn't have the corrals, and so no one returns their cart. I'm not one to buck the system. I do try to grab a stray cart from the parking lot when I arrive though, so my cart footprint is net zero. (Also because sometimes there aren't carts inside, unsurpringly.)
posted by geegollygosh at 2:40 PM on December 14, 2021

I used to love this rubric until someone pointed out how deeply ableist it is.

As a person with a mobility disability, I have way more trouble with people not putting their carts back than I do with putting my own cart back. If I can't walk enough to do that, I can't walk enough to go to the store in the first place - it's not harder to take the cart back than it is to walk around in the store, and it's often easier because the super-hard floor in the store is what really hurts, at least for me. Obviously I'm not every disabled person, but having to dodge carts in addition to cars and humans makes dealing with the parking lot more complicated.

The people I see abandoning carts are typically abled men.
posted by bile and syntax at 2:44 PM on December 14, 2021 [24 favorites]

...by leaving a shopping cart out in a parking lot, they are helping assure that at least some jobs are less disposable?

Isn't this Stephen Miller's rationale for littering?

In either case, it's reminiscent of the Parable of the Broken Window - who benefits from bad things? Are broken windows good for glaziers? Is war good because it keeps soldiers and nuclear missile technicians employed? Are abandoned shopping trolleys good for people who collect them?

"Bad things" in the original case meaning economically destructive things, and the general argument against the idea is that getting people to do economically bad things for work involves an opportunity cost, because they could have been doing economically good things instead - have the glazier glaze awesome new buildings, instead of repairing old ones; abolish the military and spend the money on education, health and the environment (like Costa Rica did in '48).

So what is the opportunity cost involved in littering, or abandoning shopping trolleys?

Well, who benefits from the saving on clearing up the bad stuff, and how are the beneficiaries going to use that saving? On good stuff? Or on bad stuff? Or stuff I don't care about?

In the case of littering, the resources spent on picking up litter where I live is spent by the local government, who have severe resource constraints and could definitely make use of those employees, equipment, etc, for better things. Plus the effort on the part of a citizen to not litter is pretty minimal, if there are bins nearby and they are regularly emptied (and, to a first approximation, there's a zero-sum resource competition between litter picking and bin emptying - littering probably reduces resources available for bin collection - so the citizen is doing double duty by using bins and not littering).

It's not as obvious in the case of the supermarket and the trolleys. Firstly, unlike carrying an empty crisp packet until you see a bin, it's clearly unpaid labour. You have to go out of your way to return it, and it's heavy. Who benefits from the saving of time if the trolley goes back? Not the person collecting it, but their employer: the supermarket.

Are they going to do something nice for any of the other parties involved with the saving? Let the employees take the saved time off to chill outside instead? Do something nice for wider society, like plant a garden? Pass on the savings to the consumers, who use the trolleys?

They won't do the first two, because come on. Maybe they'll do that last one, because competition on pricing between supermarkets is intense.

So there's an argument for returning trolleys as an act of class solidarity with your fellow shoppers - you're helping to keep prices at their current level for your fellow shoppers, as the supermarket "prices in" consumer shopping trolley behaviour.

NB: If you shop somewhere where the trolley requires a deposit - that's almost everywhere around here - then the supermarket has already made the decision for you, just as they did when they decided that instead of bringing their products in bulk to small stores near to where people live, they would reduce costs by having customers do that fiddly last mile stuff in their cars, and pass on (some of) the savings in the form of (slightly) lower prices.

What they're more likely to do though, is to pocket the bulk of the saving for their shareholders. So in returning the trolley, you're saving money for the supermarket. Likely, some of that goes to yourself and your fellow shoppers and some goes to the people who own the supermarket. I have some shares in a supermarket chain here as it happens, and recently got paid a dividend, some of which was presumably thanks to people returning their trolleys for free - thanks everybody!

Also, they might do things like lobby against litter-picking, so worth bearing that in mind.

In conclusion, I would say that it depends how much you care about 1) fellow shoppers and, especially, 2) the shareholders. For me, if the supermarket is a co-op, I'd be much more likely to throw them a bit of free labour vs a regular corporate behemoth.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 2:46 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

In general, I have no strong feelings about what other folks do with their shopping carts. The other day, however, I watched someone return a shopping cart not to the nearest cart return area but to the pile of wheel locked carts just beyond the wheel lock zone on the edge of the parking lot. It added just a little bit to a growing feeling over the past couple years that although I've spent most of my life feeling like I was too cynical, perhaps in reality I've just never been cynical enough.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 2:47 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

My grocery store has two sizes of carts and each corral is CLEARLY DIVIDED into a lane for each kind and when I retire I’m gonna hide out there all day and pop up to yell at people who blithely sail their cart into the wrong lane, and then I’m going to die of a rage stroke.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:48 PM on December 14, 2021 [33 favorites]

They recently made the street outside my door one way and some people who were using it for a shortcut still haven't... let's see how to be generous here... figured out that it's now one way, so I am getting a kick out of this discussion.
posted by clawsoon at 3:06 PM on December 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

My bike commute includes a segment of paved bike trail fenced on one side and walled on the other for a long city block that often has a cart in the exact middle of the segment. It's an absolute mystery to me why a cart would be there. It's not convenient to anything unless they are using the cart as a step to hopping the fence into the adjacent concrete canal to commit suicide. My current theory is that kids are riding the cart downhill for a bit and then getting off and walking? Still, huge asshole move to leave a cart in the middle of a path that's unlit at night used by bike commuters.
posted by BrotherCaine at 3:08 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I see that there is no disagreement about the waiter test.

We now need someone to do a scientific study of whether the waiter test and cart test are correlated. That will give us a better sense of the true moral value of the cart test.
posted by clawsoon at 3:09 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

What's the waiter test?

After the meal, do they drag the waiter out of the restaurant, into a grocery store parking lot, and force the waiter into a cart corral? If they do, they're a bad person.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 3:11 PM on December 14, 2021 [53 favorites]

I don't return my cart to the rack out in the middle of the car parking lot, I leave it next to the dilapidated bike rack for the convenience of the next stroad suffering soul.
posted by anthill at 3:11 PM on December 14, 2021

Also: littering.

At the risk of playing into certain caricatured views some may hold of Canadians, I recall a strike by garbage collectors in Toronto some twenty years ago. Public garbage bins were not emptied for a stretch of — I cannot quite recall now... ten days? Two weeks? Three weeks?

I recall it seemed in every park, the bins filled up, and the extra garbage was just placed neatly alongside the full bins.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:14 PM on December 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

Having screaming babies with me def turned me into a bad person.
posted by bq at 3:17 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

For me the true test of character is when I'm halfway across the parking lot and remember I left my reusable bags in the car. Do I turn back? Do I keep going? I can practically feel the shoulder angel & demon arguing each time.
posted by traveler_ at 3:17 PM on December 14, 2021 [12 favorites]

...you just need a really old car.

I was going to say, yeah. As framed, this example seems to presuppose the date is being picked up in a 1976 Mercury Comet.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:17 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

On my first date with my boyfriend, which was after the pandemic had started, I asked him how he'd react if he was at a restaurant and something was off with his order. He was like, "are you trying to do the waiter test even though we can't go to restaurants?!" (I was.)
posted by chaiyai at 3:17 PM on December 14, 2021 [29 favorites]

What if you bring your shopping cart all the way back to the spot in the store where they belong?

What if you break down the shopping trolley into its constituent chemical parts, and return them all to Mother Earth? Like I do, by dumping them into nearby creeks and drainage canals?
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:20 PM on December 14, 2021 [28 favorites]

Just today, a friend of mine shared this YouTube video titled “Renting a grocery cart at Aldi” for everyone in our instant messenger group to laugh at. We all live in Germany, and I am not aware of any supermarket chain in the entire country that doesn’t have a deposit system for shopping trolleys. So to us, this video seems a lot like “how to open a door” or “how to turn on a TV”.

While it’s always interesting to realise that something which every child you’ve met has taken for granted is seen as strange in other parts of the world, what really got us was some of the comments.

“Marshall Ellison”, for example, says:

So you walk the cart with all your groceries in it to the middle of the parking lot an they expect me to bring it back to save 25¢?

And “Manager Mister” lets us know what he thinks about this European nonsense:

Let me get this straight. They want me to push my cart all the way back to the front of the store for a quarter? It will take about 5 extra minutes of walking for a quarter. That is $3.50 per hour of my time. In Texas heat, hell no. That is after i spent more of my time bagging my stuff. So, i am down even more money for my time.
I am not that cheap to work for a quarter. My time is worth more than .25 cents.

Coming from a community where after checkout, you move the cart to the little packing tables at the windows, pack your shopping into your pannier bags, return the cart right there at the exit and ride off on your bike, this just feels like a glimpse into an alternate reality. (Should I mention how another time on Metafilter, a few people were talking about “taking all their groceries in one trip” and I thought, yeah, it’s always annoying to have to go back to the shop because you couldn’t fit everything you wanted to buy into your backpack—and eventually realised that the conversation was about not having to return to the car parked outside one’s home?)

And in agreement with the thesis from the FPP, I do believe that I wouldn’t get along very well with Marshall Ellison and Manager Mister.
posted by wachhundfisch at 3:21 PM on December 14, 2021 [17 favorites]

I had a cart lock up on me twenty feet into the grocery store the other day, like it thought it was being stolen but I'm standing right in the main entrance thoroughfare and I can't just fucking leave it there but also it locked up so I can't roll it, and there I was picking up and awkwardly schlepping a shopping cart to the nearest reasonable out-of-the-way spot. Just some real Book of Job shit, why am I being tested, what the fuck is this.
posted by cortex at 3:24 PM on December 14, 2021 [41 favorites]

What if they put the cart away, but leave the toilet seat up?

Thinking people everywhere put the lid down, which obviates the “but I pee standing up and people who don’t are soooo neeeeedy” drama outright.

In the Before Times, thinking people did this for several reasons, the two grossest of which involved our toothbrushes.

In the COVID age, even non-thinking people have heard the term “toilet plume,” so if you’re flushing lid-up you will be assigned to the afterlife where everyone tells toilet-seat jokes 24/7. Whether this is Heaven or Hell is left as an exercise to the reader.

If I’ve misread the question and your shopping cart has a toilet seat, you are already clearly in Heaven; please disregard.
posted by armeowda at 3:25 PM on December 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

I always put the waiter in the shopping cart corral when I am done with them.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:30 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

when I go to Pricerite

I had to laugh at myself when I realized I'd tried to parse that apparently-non-English store name as "pri-cer-i-tay" for a few seconds before realizing my mistake. *facepalm*

must be Italian
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:34 PM on December 14, 2021 [13 favorites]

You're a bad person if you don't volunteer to do labor the grocery store should be paying employees to do? How many jobs would be lost if every American put their cart back where the grocery store told them to?

Do actual grocery workers think rounding up carts is a particularly onerous task? I always assumed it would be one of the more pleasant parts of the job, like getting out for a smoking break.
posted by straight at 3:38 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

when I'm halfway across the parking lot and remember I left my reusable bags in the car. Do I turn back?

Of course you do, because a) they charge for the store bag, and b) it's made of plastic, which won't degrade for a thousand years.
posted by Rash at 3:40 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

[sorry, I usually read the thread before commenting]
posted by straight at 3:41 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

[sorry, I usually read the thread before commenting]

Is this the Metafilter test for whether you're a good person?
posted by clawsoon at 3:42 PM on December 14, 2021 [42 favorites]

Trader Joe’s has the worst parking lots.

They do, though! Every standalone TJ's I've been to has oddly cramped parking lots. The only decent ones are where they share communal parking with other stores.
posted by tavella at 3:42 PM on December 14, 2021 [8 favorites]

I bring a shopping cart into the restaurant and address it as my waiter. After that I go to the cart corral and laugh at my brilliance and then break down sobbing. Eventually they (I'm not even sure who they are this point) make me leave, at which point I leave a bad yelp review for the terrible table side service Walmart gave me in the parking lot.
posted by treepour at 3:44 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

> What if you bring your shopping cart all the way back to the spot in the store where they belong?

i do this, and I go even further: i pick up as many as 4 other extra carts on my way inside the store, because fuck you that's why also i have a gun
posted by glonous keming at 3:44 PM on December 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

I hope some of you are still maintaining heritage by delivering your trolley to a local canal.

I would but proper canals are in short supply down here.
posted by biffa at 3:48 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure how we've had this whole discussion of shopping carts without mention of noted shopping cart moral philosopher Bubbles, but here we are.
posted by clawsoon at 3:51 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

Metafilter post, first comment: Haha, people who return carts are good and people who don’t are bad, what a larf

Metafilter post, comment 100: WE ARE ALL DESTINED FOR THE BAD PLACE DUE TO BEING INEXTRICABLY ENTRAPPED IN A MESH OF EXPLOITATIVE, DEHUMANIZING SYSTEMS

The other day I parked in a Whole Foods parking lot and while walking to the store, saw a Good Person wheeling a cart back to the corral. Needing a cart myself, I said, “Hey, I’ll take that for you,” sparing him the trip. This makes me Good Squared and I shan’t hear otherwise.
posted by ejs at 3:57 PM on December 14, 2021 [18 favorites]

I don't think there's such a thing as a good person, just gotta try to be the least-bad as you can be and look better in comparison to much worse people.
posted by GoblinHoney at 3:58 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

The real test is whether you put your airport security bins away or stack your bins when you’re done to get them out of the way for the endless crunch of more bags and jackets and shoes on the conveyor.

I’ve seen y’all, and you don’t. Making me the only good person, as I have long suspected.
posted by wemayfreeze at 3:58 PM on December 14, 2021 [12 favorites]

Trader Joe's has "bad" parking lots because they don't build new locations but rather take over existing empty minimart style locations. It's a money saving measure for them but does end with a lot of people fighting for space to maneuver at all.
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:04 PM on December 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

As a person who had to go fetch shopping carts as part of their job for a long, long time I can tell you that your that personal cost to you was mis-spent. people who fetch shopping carts for a living have 1000 other things to do besides fetching carts.

In high school I worked at a supermarket, doing every random job possible, and corralling carts was a big one. The supermarket was atop a hill, and the parking lot sloped downhill--gentle near the top but suddenly steep about halfway down. I guess for a 16 year old boy it's a good thing in terms of health and staminal training to push a line of 20 carts up that hill, but man it sucked at the time. And several times a shift a cart would roll down that hill, hit a curb and land in a ditch next to the busy highway, and guess who had to get those? That was fun.
posted by zardoz at 4:08 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

There's any number of concrete examples one could use for "Is someone willing to endure appropriately minor hardship to them for an abstract collective good?", getting hung up on one of them is missing the corral for the cars, as it were. (not saying that this particular instance is minor for everyone, to be clear, that's already been hashed out)
(and then its counterpart, "can someone avoid being a jerk to someone in a service position?")

Naturally though, this quickly became "why are people judging me individually for my cart choices" even though that's nowhere to be seen in the prompt. I'm pretty sure that the original trolley problem proposal didn't also include strapping people into a trolley & experimenting on their reactions.

"Do you voluntarily wear a mask in a pandemic (and do you avoid dick-nosing it)?" is much higher stakes than this, but gets at the same question. (and I suspect that you could probably draw some correlation in an aggregate level between cart-return-rates & mask-adherence by region, now that we're testing this one live)
posted by CrystalDave at 4:10 PM on December 14, 2021 [9 favorites]

I'm also just so tired of glib online morality tests. - lunasol This, so, so much, this. Morality is more complex than shopping carts, but people on ~~the internet~~ social media love to tell everyone else they're doing it wrong, so they can feel superior. I park near a cart corral so I can find my car, I corral my cart, though when I had a small child, my back always hurt, I was always tired, and give me a fucking break, willya. Side note: when I was massively, exhaustingly pregnant, I waited for a spot and a horrible person exploited the way the person pulled out to steal it, and I am still sorry I didn't key her luxury car. The kid has been old enough to vote for a while, but my rage is a glowing ember.

Littering is a bad thing; don't do it.
posted by theora55 at 4:26 PM on December 14, 2021 [11 favorites]

Pro tip. When someone approaches you in the Aldi parking lot and offers you a quarter for your cart, tell them "Keep it, and buy yourself something nice."
They will LOL, ISYN.
Works every time.
posted by Floydd at 4:27 PM on December 14, 2021 [7 favorites]

Putting the cart back seems like a test you can only pass - in the sense the outcome means something - since there's so many legitimate reasons, as this thread has pointed out, for not doing it.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 4:27 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

What if I am a sociopath? What if I murder people? But I put the cart in the corral to appear normal.

Not saying I am. Just asking.
posted by Splunge at 4:27 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

<glib>Do you return the shopping cart from your car to the corral/store, or are you a good person who doesn't drive a car?</glib>
posted by gurple at 4:29 PM on December 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

I guess I'm flummoxed by the people who are able enough to walk into the store, grab a cart, push it all the way around the store, but then are too disabled to return it to a designated collection location. Even if you're in a disabled parking space, you're very close to the front of the store and can leave it on the sidewalk, right?

But then again, I always grab a loose cart from the lot and bring it back to the store, or push it into a nearby corral.
posted by hwyengr at 4:33 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

is it a virtue to do something because, if noticed not doing it, one might be shamed?
posted by philip-random at 4:43 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I spend the extra 45 seconds and rearrange the cart corrals so that all the big carts are together and the small carts are in their own rows. This does not make me a good person, but does indicate that I have worked shitty jobs and additionally have some undiagnosed OCD.
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:44 PM on December 14, 2021 [18 favorites]

is it a virtue to do something because, if noticed not doing it, one might be shamed?

Plato really missed an opportunity by not starting "The Republic" with a discussion of shopping carts.
posted by clawsoon at 4:49 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

What kind of person does it make you if you see someone cast a cart off into a mostly empty lot and then get in their car to leave so you immediately stop what you're doing to go snag the abandoned cart and place it behind the departing car before they back out of their spot.
posted by phunniemee at 4:54 PM on December 14, 2021 [22 favorites]

What if they put the cart away, but leave the toilet seat up?

you have shopping carts with toilets? what the hell kind of supermarket do you go to?
posted by pyramid termite at 4:55 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

I don't care what people do or don't do with shopping carts, but I definitely draw the line with people who are rude to waitstaff, or who undertip.
posted by Annabelle74 at 5:01 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I guess I'm flummoxed by the people who are able enough to walk into the store, grab a cart, push it all the way around the store, but then are too disabled to return it to a designated collection location. Even if you're in a disabled parking space, you're very close to the front of the store and can leave it on the sidewalk, right?

A lot of disabled people are in genuine pain or exhausted by the end of a shopping trip and just can’t do it, even if it seems easy to someone without a disability.
posted by corey flood at 5:03 PM on December 14, 2021 [15 favorites]

What if it's an avant-garde experience where being rude to the waiter and undertipping is expected as part of the cultural tradition though.
posted by Drastic at 5:10 PM on December 14, 2021 [17 favorites]

I’m surprised at how many mefites seem to shop at grocery stores where the parking lot slopes down to a highway/drainage ditch/the flames of perdition. This suggests to me that perhaps the ideal form for a parking area would be like a shallow amphitheater, with the store entrance at the lowest point. You could release your shopping cart wherever it suited you and it would find its own way back to the store.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:12 PM on December 14, 2021 [33 favorites]

I very much understand the pain/ability tradeoff. Perhaps more people should be considering using the motorized carts.
posted by hwyengr at 5:12 PM on December 14, 2021

Wait. Did the waiter abandon a shopping cart?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:13 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

I don't care if you're good or bad deep down inside. If you mess with the wait staff, you're a profound fool. Don't ever f*** with somebody who's between the kitchen and your table.
posted by philip-random at 5:14 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

I time it so on the way in I walk past someone just emptying their cart and I take it in for them. Problem solved! On the way out, I just reverse everything.
posted by hypnogogue at 5:20 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

You're a bad person if you don't volunteer to do labor the grocery store should be paying employees to do? How many jobs would be lost if every American put their cart back where the grocery store told them to?

Precisely why I make a point of knocking over a couple end-caps whenever I’m out shopping, which inevitably results in employees hailing me as a job-creator nonpareil.
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 5:28 PM on December 14, 2021 [48 favorites]

Two fun shopping cart stories:

(a) Someone left a shopping cart in my neighborhood (not me, I haven't stolen one since college) and someone else also left a beat-up old truck taking up the same parking space outside for weeks on end. This drove my mom absolutely crazy that this person was taking up "the good parking" when she was in the vicinity. Somehow this turned into a family friend being talked into (who talked him into it shall remain anonymous) picking up the shopping cart and sticking it in the back of the truck. THE TRUCK WAS MOVED IMMEDIATELY after that, lemme tell ya.

(b) Hoarding runs in the family like whoa, and my grandfather had a storage unit for I don't know how long. It took my mom something like 20 years after his death to finally get around to opening it and cleaning it out. It was filled with complete and utter useless shit, like what looked like moonshine, broken and unfixable furniture, and several stolen shopping carts from places that were LONG SINCE OUT OF BUSINESS. She insisted on taking months to get rid of every single item in it "properly" like finding somewhere to recycle the metal and whatever else, and at one point she actually downsized the storage unit while she was still getting rid of stuff for months. And she told me later that she had walked the shopping carts OVER THE TRAIN TRACKS, WHILE IN HER SIXTIES, to attempt to return them to stores that were long since out of business. (Did anyone take them? No idea. I assume she just left them around the empty shells of stores or whatever grocery store had replaced them.)

But if you want the biggest "who's a good person for returning the carts" award, MY MOM WINS FOR ETERNITY, Y'ALL.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:28 PM on December 14, 2021 [41 favorites]

Clearly the American solution will be to develop self-driving carts that return themselves.
posted by condour75 at 5:33 PM on December 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

I very much understand the pain/ability tradeoff. Perhaps more people should be considering using the motorized carts.

For me it’s the lights and noise that are often worse than I expected and which frequently leave me half a step from a breakdown by the time I get out of the store, which leaves my motor control and spatial awareness shot, such that I’m likely to injure myself or anyone passing within several feet of me as I return the cart.

But I always do return it because my anxiety over a car hitting the cart and injuring someone is worse than my anxiety over injuring someone with the cart. There’s a lot of trying not to cry while returning carts.
posted by brook horse at 5:34 PM on December 14, 2021 [10 favorites]

I hope some of you are still maintaining heritage by delivering your trolley to a local canal.

Toast of London
posted by ActingTheGoat at 5:40 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

where the parking lot slopes down to a highway/drainage ditch/the flames of perdition

The parking lot of perdition is paved with good intentions.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:40 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

Everyone needs to see this tiktok (and part 2) of a shopping cart attendant hilariously getting back at a cart non-returner. It might be the only thing I've ever watched on tiktok, but I promise it is worth it.
posted by msbrauer at 5:47 PM on December 14, 2021 [33 favorites]

You could release your shopping cart wherever it suited you and it would find its own way back to the store.

It's always about drainage. In more rural areas without on-site stormwater systems, they want to get the water as close to the street as possible, possibly tying into the roadway ditch (depending on local regulations about treatment). In areas with municipal storm sewers or an on-site stormwater detention/retention system, it can be a flatter slope with localized low points where the inlets are.
posted by hwyengr at 5:47 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I very much understand the pain/ability tradeoff. Perhaps more people should be considering using the motorized carts.

Perhaps more people should stop judging strangers' handling of their disabilities.
posted by Flock of Cynthiabirds at 5:48 PM on December 14, 2021 [27 favorites]

How is this the longest comment scroll I've noticed on Mefi?

Anyway, reading the first third of this it dawned on me that parking lots in the USA are significantly larger than ours.

Ergo good folk in the USA must be far better than good folk here. Right?

also, and probably stated above somewhere: This feels like a *really* low bar for "good person".
posted by xurizaemon at 5:56 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

Maybe so, but from my Midwestern upbringing (however flawed that may be), I'd walk over a bed of nails to not inconvenience a store employee.
posted by hwyengr at 6:00 PM on December 14, 2021 [5 favorites]

I'm on the fence on this one. An old lady in the parking lot had a cart she just emptied into her trunk. I offered to take it back (and reuse, as I was on my way into the grocers). She actually laughed and said she was going to be bad, and just leave the cart nearby, so fine, take it.

I think some of this is beyond age or infirmity and just tapping into plain American laziness. I don't know if laziness is good or bad, but it is definitely lazy, and I'm not sure what it is, but my tolerance for this kind of lazy bullshit has dropped precipitously since March 2020.

I like what they do in the UK and France, where you have to put a one pound or one Euro coin into the cart. If you want to be lazy, there needs to be a cost, however marginal.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:06 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

The life cycle of a shopping trolley.

(Using the morality test of the age Leunig has gone a bit weird re vaccination but it's a cartoon from while ago.)
posted by freethefeet at 6:32 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

I live in Minnesota and for 6 months of the year, no cart gatherer should be subject to the grey gloppy swimming pool/black ice curling rink that is the grocery store parking lot longer than necessary. They often have a robot that does the pushing but they still have to do the wrangling. Not putting them in the corral is rude here. Some places even have roofs over their corrals so the snow doesn't collect on the carts while they wait to be retrieved.
posted by soelo at 6:38 PM on December 14, 2021 [8 favorites]

Wait, what the fack do y'mean I'm supposed to return shopping carts and not take them home to fix up and sell them back to other stores?

How the fuck am I supposed to feed m'kitties? I've been doing this for years, how the fack am I supposed to feed my kitties?

That's one fine fucking lookin' kitty right there!
posted by loquacious at 6:42 PM on December 14, 2021 [7 favorites]

msbrauer that is one of the most hilariously brilliant things I've ever seen!
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:43 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

Can we at least agree that leaving the waiter in the disabled parking spot with their ~~toilet seat~~ pants down is a bad move?

Seriously though. If people could at least not park their carts in the middle of the fucking handicapped parking space, that'd be great.

No, not in the blue line marked off area for wheelchair accessibility either. People use that space.

My local grocery store also has spaces marked out for expectant mothers / people with small children. Leave those alone too.
posted by mrgoat at 6:44 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

I always assumed it would be one of the more pleasant parts of the job

I'm sure they've found ways to take the fun out of it, by assigning quotas or something with time. And always unpleasant on cold rainy days.
posted by Rash at 6:52 PM on December 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

is it a virtue to do something because, if noticed not doing it, one might be shamed

30 Aldi carts with no redemption and a Walmart Winnebago squiky wheel oiled for your sins.
posted by clavdivs at 6:52 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

Also, that tiktok is funny, but clearly staged. Like FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: - level staged.

Also also, while I'm sure it sounds like a great time, gathering carts in -20 while it's snowing and the parking lot's a frozen deathtrap and the managers are getting on your ass for not gathering them fast enough is probably not quite as fun as it sounds. I'm disabled too, I get it if you can't put it back. I don't put mine back because I can't use one in the first place. Make your own call on that, I don't know you and I ain't gonna judge.

I do know the workers are catching nine kinds of shit through their whole shift, so I personally just try not to be the tenth kind. That should be the test. Given whatever circumstances you're in, are you going out of your way to be the tenth kind of shit someone has to deal with today? No? Thumbs up dot gif, hashtag you're good people emoji, or whatever.
posted by mrgoat at 7:09 PM on December 14, 2021 [11 favorites]

Where is this magical place of which you speak?

Can confirm, even in the absence of having to pay a deposit, carts in my mid size west coast Canadian city are generally returned. The only exception seems to be the Costco and WalMart which also are they only stores I recall seeing one of those powered cart pushers in use (though maybe Home Depot also has them though they mostly have platform carts that don't stack). This seems to hold during the pandemic which has seen the removal/disabling of deposit systems.

...you just need a really old car.

'98 isn't old. *whisper from off screen*. 24 years?!? Really? Ok then. *Dang I'm old*

Though the first car I owned that I really wished had power locks was an 84 Fiero. Those cars had a very tall front-to-back console that made reaching across pretty onerous. Way worse than my huge '66 Chrysler.

Let me get this straight. They want me to push my cart all the way back to the front of the store for a quarter? It will take about 5 extra minutes of walking for a quarter. That is $3.50 per hour of my time. In Texas heat, hell no. That is after i spent more of my time bagging my stuff. So, i am down even more money for my time.

Here places that take deposits charge a Loonie so if it takes five minutes to return a cart (and I've never been in such a huge lot without distributed cart return) that's like $12/hour. Not quite minimum wage but also tax free.
posted by Mitheral at 7:28 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

No, not in the blue line marked off area for wheelchair accessibility either. People use that space.

That is specifically where our grocery store expects people who cannot return the carts to place them, in the stripey zone next to handicapped parking. Employees look out for those carts and return them regularly. I place mine by the handicapped sign for the other side, so that at least one wheel is on the other side of the concrete at the base of the sign, thus anchoring it.
posted by Flock of Cynthiabirds at 7:34 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

I wonder if we may finally have found an issue that unites divided America

Joe Rogan and Dan Crenshaw Talk Carts
posted by philip-random at 7:34 PM on December 14, 2021

Also, that tiktok is funny, but clearly staged. Like FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: - level staged.

Staged as in well planned yes. Friggin loved it.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:35 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

It's always about drainage. In more rural areas without on-site stormwater systems, they want to get the water as close to the street as possible, possibly tying into the roadway ditch

I didn’t say it was a perfect plan.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:58 PM on December 14, 2021

Many years ago I worked at a grocery store and had to often go outside to collect carts. It was one of the best parts of the job! Go outside, move a few carts around, then walk across the parking lot and go sit in the donut shop for a while or see if anybody left anything good at the Salvation Army drop-off spot. Sometimes I walked across the street and visited my buddies at the movie theater to get some free popcorn!

Also, at the end of the night we were instructed to take all the blue plastic grocery bags out of the customer "recycling" bin and throw them in the dumpster.

Also also, a vending machine outside the store sold 50 cent cans of a Mountain Dew knockoff called "Hillbilly Juice."

Note: I am an adult now and I return carts to the proper area.
posted by SystematicAbuse at 8:37 PM on December 14, 2021 [5 favorites]

Using a cart?

I can't fathom how you can sleep at night knowing all the damage you're doing to the environment. Plastic carts? Metal Frame? You're killing Mother Earth, and I for one won't stand for it.
posted by Sphinx at 8:47 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I got a cart that stays in my van. I take it in to bigger stores, or even Trader Joe's, (whose parking lots are just fine, a more intimate experience,) I fill my cart with what I want, go thru the line, and put my paid for, unbagged groceries, back in the cart. I put it in the van and go home, take in the cart and put away my unbagged stuff, I bag my cold stuff in my own insulated bag. I do put the cart back in my van when I am finished with it. I folds down into a manageable size. Eventually I will be less able, but for now it works.
posted by Oyéah at 9:24 PM on December 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

Jesus H. Christ, I put up a lightweight nothing post, maybe somebody get a laugh, inside 20 minutes it's got 56 comments and moving FAST....

~~~~~

I mostly return carts to the little cart area. Not always but mostly. And I'm also one like others here, I'll take someones cart for them, a fun thing, a smile with the nice people. Small kindnesses for one another, it's being a good animal.

Also. The store I mostly shop in has this thing where one of the wheels of the cart freezes after it's been stopped long enough to get the groceries out, almost impossible to push them, pretty sure it's because of ppl walking off with the carts, they've devised a way to keep the cart from going missing. If I come across that scene I will *try* to put the cart back but I'm not going to wrestle the damn thing; I take it to the nearest grassy island and hook two wheels over the concrete; more than once I've just chunked them over into the grass, rather than wrestle.

There is a guy who has worked at that store for a long, long time, ten years maybe (?) and I know a lot of the long-timers there, give them a smile, a handshake b4 this whole stupid covid thing, now an elbow touch. Anyways, this one guy has just adamantly refused my overtures of kindness, such as they are, just a smile and a hello maybe, but just here in the past couple of weeks he's finally opened to me, a genuine smile, a "Hey, how ya doin'?" sort of thing. It's ridiculous how good that's made me feel.

~~~~~

I'm tall and he's not, sometimes that makes ppl hate me, by ppl I mean, specifically, "Men." I learned fast when walking into a guys office for a job interview and he's short, I'm shaking hands and sitting down FAST, all in one motion. Not all shorter guys give a rats ass but some do. I damn sure don't give a rats ass, tall or short, people all have various strengths and weaknesses, just part of the show. Anyways, I don't know why this guy didn't want me to be alive (OK, that's probably overstating it. But it sure seemed he wished I'd get hit by a bus.) It's fun to have somehow won him over.

Little victories.

~~~~~

Shopping carts. Someone upthread mentioned this and I'm all about it -- if there's not too many people around I'll get to running whilst pushing that cart and then feet up and onto it, wizzing also, throwing my weight this side or that one to steer it. Fun.

~~~~~

The waiter test is, I think, a good one. If a person treats someone in a wait staff role badly, or contemptuously, they are a person I'm not going to spend much time with, as in, never again if I can help it, and mostly I can

Another test, to see how you work with another person, or if you can work with them at all -- get in a canoe with them. It doesn't matter if I'm front or rear in that canoe, either seat gives just great information to have: does the person continually steer us into trees ET CET. One old friend, years gone by, absolutely the worst canoe ride I've ever been on. An old girlfriend, also, not as bad as my friend Roger but often into branches shrubs what-have-you, and unaware she was doing it. Sadly, I was already deeply into it with her -- a canoe ride a year earlier and I'd have had actionable data.

~~~~~

Anyways. Hell of a surprise, how fast this thread moved, and the emotions stirred. Fun fun fun on a Tuesday afternoon.
posted by dancestoblue at 9:38 PM on December 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

Another test for who is the better person. The one who posts a hilarious video, or the one who feels compelled to point out out that it's obviously staged?
posted by Zumbador at 10:07 PM on December 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I used to love this rubric until someone pointed out how deeply ableist it is.

As someone who has been handicapped to the point that I could barely walk for months on end (or only had one functioning hand for a while but with no visible deformities) and was partnered for many years to someone who worked at grocery stores, I can assure you that asking staff for a little assistance is preferred to just leaving it in the middle of the parking lot. If they're going to have to go take care of it anyway, they generally prefer to do it right away before it damages a car. Gathering stray carts is sometimes enjoyable when it's not an overcrowded parking lot but miserable in terrible weather or when there's so little space that everyone is stressed out and hunting for any available spot.

You're a bad person if you abandon a shopping cart?

Yes. That's what the article is about. You're creating a hazard for others that someone else (who's generally at the bottom of the income ladder) will have to clean up after. Similarly, we don't celebrate people that pee on the bathroom floor, reasoning that it'll create jobs.

they are helping assure that at least some jobs are less disposable?

Wat? No. Don't pass off being lazy as virtuous. I genuinely can't tell if you're trolling or not here.

If you buy more than you can carry and drive to the store, you're a bad person . . . Driving to the store is a large part of why the world is awful.

I know Metafilter doesn't do conversations about cars well, but this is getting a little ridiculous.

the tedious labor you perform that somehow never elicited the congratulations you secretly thought you've always deserved.

Ah, yes, somehow too tedious for you to want to perform but A-OK to pass on to largely minimum wage employees!
posted by Candleman at 10:44 PM on December 14, 2021 [13 favorites]

I very much understand the pain/ability tradeoff. Perhaps more people should be considering using the motorized carts.

You mean the ones that even the biggest stores have only two of, so there usually isn’t one free? The ones that are barely functional to begin with or haven’t been plugged in to charge by the last person to use them? The ones you can’t reach the tall shelves from, so when you stand up to grab something you get judgmental comments from people who think if you can stand up at all you must be faking your disability? The ones that hold a quarter of the merchandise as a regular cart? The ones where you have to walk all the way into the store and wait twenty minutes in line at the service desk to get the key for, unless you’re there when the service desk is closed, in which case you’re SOL? Yeah, gee, I can’t imagine why more people don’t use those.

One of my favorite sights of spring is when the big banks of dirty plowed snow at the edge of the parking lot start to melt, and all the carts that have been plowed into it all winter start to be exposed like a dinosaur bones.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:47 PM on December 14, 2021 [17 favorites]

You're a bad person if I can think of some group to put you in that also contains other people whose choices I disapprove of. I get a free pass personally, obviously. Rationalizations for specific cases are available on request.
posted by flabdablet at 1:01 AM on December 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

The internet: [thing that's obviously meant as a bit of casual fun]

MetaFilter: [LEADEN SERIOUSNESS]
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:09 AM on December 15, 2021 [22 favorites]

MetaFilter: [LEADEN SERIOUSNESS]

Do you know how many plates of beans can fit in one of those carts?
posted by Foosnark at 4:34 AM on December 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

You'll see your hill to die on, if you look past all those other hills.
posted by filtergik at 4:44 AM on December 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think the shopping cart test isn't about who puts the cart away. It's an indicator for how seriously a person takes the test as an indicator. Someone who feels passionately about the test is someone with a strong sense of propriety over pretty inconsequential things. That would be a red flag in my book. Having worked as someone who collected carts at a supermarket for several years, I can attest that the people who were most passionate about not returning carts were not employees, and definitely made an impression as people one would not want to have to deal with casually, let alone partner up with in any significant way.

Curious how many former supermarket employees think it was the better part of the job, myself included.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:16 AM on December 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

Re: Trader Joe's Parking lots:

Trader Joe's have such a small footprint that the size of the parking lot they are allowed to have is very small, since the amount of parking is directly correlated to square footage. I work at a Trader Joe's standalone store that was built to be a Trader Joe's. There aren't even enough parking spots for the employees (so we aren't allowed to park there.) We hear some version of "Y'all need more parking spaces" or "Why didn't you put in a bigger parking lot?" several times a day. They always look at you funny when you blame the fire marshall.
posted by schyler523 at 5:25 AM on December 15, 2021

> I usually read the thread before commenting

Wait, what? Are you supposed to read the thread before commenting? Next thing, they're going to be expecting us to read the article before commenting.
posted by vincebowdren at 5:38 AM on December 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

Curious how many former supermarket employees think it was the better part of the job, myself included.

It was decidedly not fun in the depths of winter (dark at 4:15, cars in parking lots not expecting pedestrians, moving carts through snow sucks) or the height of summer (wearing a madatory collared shirt, bow tie and vest as the bank clock keeps telling you it's 103 degrees).

Some times it could be a little meditative, I guess. And on the summer days sometimes you could buy a popsicle and eat it standing in a walk-in freezer afterwards, which was Pretty Good.
posted by Earthtopus at 6:07 AM on December 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

Someone's behavior towards service staff seems worth paying attention to, since so many people reveal their entitlement and willingness to behave badly when they feel like they are unaccountable in those moments.

But cart returning is more complicated, for all the reasons people have described. I happily don't live somewhere with a serious snow/ice winter any more, but when I did, it was a special kind of hell to try and push a shopping cart across a slushy, poorly plowed parking lot with the wheels digging in and locking up, for example.

Interestingly to me, the neighborhood I live in now and the one I lived in previously are both mixed income (i.e., lots of long term poor and homeless residents, plus a growing percentage of comparatively well-off incomers) and built around a grocery store. In my last neighborhood, so many people would use the store carts to haul stuff home, and then leave the cart on the sidewalk, that the store would send out a truck a couple of times a week to collect up the carts. In my current neighborhood, almost no one borrows a cart that way. My best guess is that once people start doing that, it gets normalized and more people join in. It was clearly a hassle for the store, but they never implemented any kind of technical solution either.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:37 AM on December 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

Collecting carts was the only job I was ever good at. Un-corralled carts helped break up the monotony.
I have dreams of an Odessa Steps sequence involving a shopping cart that's so amazing that it eclipses all the other homages.
posted by detachd at 6:39 AM on December 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

The cart test is a good test of a certain narrow kind of public-mindedness - will you inconvenience yourself slightly for the benefit of people like you?

The waiter test actually tests for a two things. Most obviously, it tests for low-level psychopathy - are you mean to a waiter just because you can be, and despite it potentially hurting you too (bad service, etc.). But it also tests for leadership and self-assertion - do you elicit attentive and accommodating service from the waiter, or do you allow yourself to be neglected, mis-served or easily led?
posted by MattD at 6:45 AM on December 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

Three questions:

1 why do the people who deliver your groceries bring shopping carts?

2 why do they leave them with you?

3 why are you supposed to take them to a parking lot?
posted by signal at 7:12 AM on December 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

do you elicit attentive and accommodating service from the waiter, do you allow yourself to be neglected, mis-served or easily led?

Wow. I have never in my life elicited "attentive and accommodating service" from a waiter.

I don't care. Like, on the rare occasion that I get the wrong order/side/etc., I'll usually let the waiter know (because maybe it's someone else's) but if I'm fine with keeping it I'll let them know that too. It's not that I'm a pushover, it's that I seriously don't care enough. If I'm on a time limit sometimes I'll let the waiter know and then ask what I should order in that case but that's pretty rare. If I get what I consider consistently bad service - this has happened to me like, once - I just don't go back. I don't get into it at the time.

The pandemic has brought home to me how many people rely on restaurants to give them a sense of being attended to but for me that's actually one reason I stopped going out to eat as a like, Friday evening habit.

That does say something about me. It's not really A Thing with me to require attentive service. I just want decent food. All the really top-notch/expensive restaurant fuss that I've had in my life, and due in part to a phase and in part to my former career I have been lucky enough to dine in some really nice places in various countries, has mostly either been nice or really discomfiting, so I've never had to elicit anything in those environments.

I do return my shopping carts though and sometimes I scoop another one or two up with me as payment for the times I was shopping while experiencing morning sickness and left carts because I was about to throw up. That happened with some frequency because sometimes there was A Smell in the store - pregnancy is weird and unpredictable.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:23 AM on December 15, 2021 [7 favorites]

What's the waiter test?

You are standing on a bridge over the grocery store parking lot. An unattended shopping cart is hurtling toward your car which you just had detailed, for goodness sake. By pulling a lever, you can summon a waiter, who will try to bring you a snack, but who will instead be hit by the cart on his way across the lot. This will cause him grievous bodily injury, and he will drop his tray. You will not get your snack, but your car will be saved. Do you tip the waiter, and if so how much?
posted by The Bellman at 7:23 AM on December 15, 2021 [17 favorites]

Do you tip the waiter, and if so how much?

Yes. The waiter could spit at me, curse my name, and swear an oath to destroy my first born child and I would still tip them at least 20% even though it's a pickup order because the pandemic is shitting on food service workers and destroying the traditional revenue stream that made them even remotely whole for their labor.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:28 AM on December 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

Has anyone mentioned Cart Narcs yet?

https://www.youtube.com/c/CartNarcs
posted by Furnace of Doubt at 7:54 AM on December 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

Shopping carts are the most personifiable wheeled vehicle in the history of humanity. That's why they're so fun to push down hills into ditches or throw into lakes, or plow into massive two-story drifts of filthy parking lot snow. That's why that person's art project way upthread was so great. Shopping carts pull at the heartstrings strangely. They are clumsy and ungainly in a way that excites both pity and resentment. Think of one of them given a hard shove and clattering off on a solitary journey across the parking lot, that stupid, cheery metal-basket-rattle noise they make at speed? The pathetic, tiny, crappy wheels? They are at once infuriating and hilarious because they were made to serve and to suck in equal measure, deliberately designed to do their jobs poorly. The shopping cart is the song of human parsimony, played on an airhorn, directly into our faces. They are necessary to us, but also we all know that if we were really Doing Life Right, we wouldn't ever have to see or touch or think about them. They are always in the way when they're not needed or absent when they are, and our every interaction with them is fraught and uncomfortable. They linger at the edges of consciousness, not worthy of attention but leaching attention. We don't want to think of them, ever. They are beneath consideration. Yet here they are. All the time. Every week. Haunting us for all our lives.
posted by Don Pepino at 8:22 AM on December 15, 2021 [8 favorites]

Another test for who is the better person. The one who posts a hilarious video, or the one who feels compelled to point out out that it's obviously staged?

so it's bad to suggest something isn't as it seems? Is it worse to be pretty damned sure of it but choose to bite one's tongue thus allowing the deception to fester, perhaps infect future generations, entire cultures?

I do find that people HATE being corrected. I've learned the hard way to think seriously before doing so.

"Is this a hill I really want to dispute?"

"Actually, it's more of a chasm."

"Fuck off!"
posted by philip-random at 8:28 AM on December 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

It’s a well, actually.
posted by brook horse at 8:33 AM on December 15, 2021 [14 favorites]

I always bring the cart back to the corral, BUT I ram it in freestyle as hard as I can to get a demolition derby thing going, the louder the better.

I contain multitudes.
posted by Capt. Renault at 8:39 AM on December 15, 2021 [5 favorites]

From way back in 2006, The Stray Shopping Cart Project (it eventually became a bo ok).
posted by box at 8:55 AM on December 15, 2021

But it also tests for leadership and self-assertion - do you elicit attentive and accommodating service from the waiter, or do you allow yourself to be neglected, mis-served or easily led?

"Did you see how I commanded his respect?" I ask my date as I decide between a 13 or 15 percent tip, my alpha-status re-asserted.
posted by Think_Long at 8:58 AM on December 15, 2021 [13 favorites]

Yet here they are. All the time. Every week. Haunting us for all our lives.

Just gonna leave this here...

Carts of Darkness

Murray Siple's feature-length documentary follows a group of homeless men who have combined bottle picking with the extreme sport of racing shopping carts down the steep hills of North Vancouver.

Trailer and full-length film on Youtube (the latter might be region-restricted to Canada).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:58 AM on December 15, 2021 [5 favorites]

I contain multitudes.

I sometimes make little vroom-vroom noises while accelerating the cart through a turn at the end of an aisle. Handles better if you do that.

And making brake-squeal sounds when pulling up to the checkout like it's an F1 pit brightens everyone's day. I think.

Both of the above are typically followed by a deep, disappointed sigh from the spouse, but adding sound effects to grocery cart operation is a hill I'm prepared to die on.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:16 AM on December 15, 2021 [18 favorites]

I wanna go shopping with mandolin_conspiracy.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:22 AM on December 15, 2021 [5 favorites]

Hey so while we are all here talking about shopping carts and ableism: I always put my shopping carts in the corral, and usually also take the time to put away a cart or two that someone else abandoned, because once upon a time I worked with an organization that promotes disability accessibility, and I learned from the disabled people who designed our public education programs that, as bile and syntax mentioned above, people leaving a bunch of uncorralled carts scattered around a parking lot can make it challenging and potentially dangerous for people who use wheelchairs or walkers or other mobility support equipment, or who have balance issues or depth perception issues, or who have partial or full blindness, to navigate a complicated space where they are already having to maneuver carefully around other customers and moving and parked cars. (Yes this is a problem even if you leave your cart loose far from any accessible parking spot, because firstly abandoned carts have wheels and don't necessarily stay where you put them, and secondly disabled people don't always get to park in accessible spots because sometimes they are full.)

So if you are an person who has the energy and ability to return a cart, and you are not trying to wrangle one or more infants or toddlers, pointing out that this morality test is ableist is cool, but what would be even cooler is you also helped people move in the world more easily and safely by taking the time to put your own cart in the corral (and maybe putting someone else's abandoned cart away, too).
posted by BlueJae at 9:30 AM on December 15, 2021 [17 favorites]

I used to love this rubric until someone pointed out how deeply ableist it is.

And how much it selects against parents as well.

Sorry, but someone's going to have to explain this one to me. If you are not able to use the cart and push it around the store in the first place, how do you even have the cart to leave it in the middle of the parking lot? It would be one thing to say that the design of the carts themselves is ableist, that someone has to stand and push it. But that's a different matter altogether. I find it unlikely that someone would be able to stand and push a full cart one moment, and be unable to put away an empty one quite suddenly the next.

And why do parents get a pass on being rude? Is putting the cart away not a great teachable moment for your kids?
posted by Ardnamurchan at 9:31 AM on December 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

I sometimes make little vroom-vroom noises while accelerating the cart through a turn at the end of an aisle. Handles better if you do that.

Ooh, hey guys, let me tell you a fun activity you can do! You know in airports, the arrivals section when you deplane, and they have those quite mini-sized baggage carts for you to carry your hand luggage, before you get to baggage and customs?

If you sort of lean over it, your gut just at handlebar level and bending over, get it balanced right, you can run along and then ride it like a go cart! Or like a kick bike or scooter, I guess. Pretty good speeds possible and no question you can get right out in front of your crowd. With these big modern airports you might be walking 0.5km or more, who got time for that?

Advanced users can even grab on to the battery operated VIP jeep things as they zip by, hitch a ride!

My business associates in China were unimpressed, but it was a lot of fun.
posted by Meatbomb at 9:52 AM on December 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

I ram it in freestyle as hard as I can to get a demolition derby thing going

Good to know. But getting back to the shopping carts ...
posted by Paul Slade at 9:52 AM on December 15, 2021 [11 favorites]

But it also tests for leadership and self-assertion - do you elicit attentive and accommodating service from the waiter, or do you allow yourself to be neglected, mis-served or easily led?
So this is starting to sound like a job interview and not a shared meal. I don't test my friends like this. I have helped two people I know send their food back without feeling bad when it was clearly the wrong dish. You must remain polite and not make it a big deal, but it is okay ask for a correction and get what you actually ordered. Pandemic eating has changed everything, but I still look in my bag to verify all the food is there before leaving.
posted by soelo at 10:01 AM on December 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

I find it unlikely that someone would be able to stand and push a full cart one moment, and be unable to put away an empty one quite suddenly the next.

I’m genuinely glad for the good fortune you have in your own health and that of those around you, because if you or someone you love had any one of a number of debilitating conditions, this would not actually be very hard to understand.

Activities like pushing a shopping cart can be painful for some people. They can drain someone’s energy to the point where they can’t walk any farther. A person can have sensory dysregulation or anxiety that means that one more trip across a busy parking lot can lead to a breakdown and they can’t drive home.

If you haven’t seen it first-hand it’s hard to believe that such conditions are real but I assure you, they are.
posted by corey flood at 10:13 AM on December 15, 2021 [12 favorites]

I see we're at the "abled people who can't take disabled people's word for things, leading to detailed explanations about disability that frankly shouldn't be necessary" portion of the program, and, well, can we just not?
posted by champers at 10:23 AM on December 15, 2021 [8 favorites]

One test is if you return the cart.

Another test is if you consider that people may have different circumstances and aren't "failing" if they don't return the cart.

But the true test is if you steal the cart and watch it roll into the bayou, cause that shit is hella awesome to watch and fuck that wage-stealing grocery store chain anyway.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:56 AM on December 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

I'm not saying it takes great dominance to get decent service in restaurants, but Ruth Reichl would do personas as a restaurant critic. One of them was an extremely pathetic and unassertive older woman, and one of the thing Reichl reported on was what sort of service she got.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:57 AM on December 15, 2021 [7 favorites]

Ardnamurchan: "And why do parents get a pass on being rude? Is putting the cart away not a great teachable moment for your kids?"

As an empathy exercise, imagine yourself with a one-year-old baby on a shopping trip, and how you would manage the entire experience. Imagine it is fussy, unpredictable, needy; always moments away from needing to be fed or changed, and you have spent months underslept and overtaxed. As an added bit of context, know that in some places people will literally call the police if you leave a child unattended in a car for even a minute.

Next imagine a toddler who can also run off and be hit by a car if you don't pay attention.

Make your choices and imagine how others might make theirs.
posted by team lowkey at 11:25 AM on December 15, 2021 [6 favorites]

You don't get to critique parents and act like they are lazy until you physically have to handle getting all the groceries with an infant, and then wrangling that infant and groceries back into a car. Without leaving the baby alone for an instant. While the baby is screaming. And people all around you are glaring, muttering, and generally being judgey and unempathetic.

I've never done it. But I know how hard it must be. You must not imagine hard enough, or know any parents of young kids.
posted by tiny frying pan at 11:36 AM on December 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

You're leaving the grocery store and you see a cart sitting in the middle of the lot. It could easily damage the paint on the cars nearby, but you're not putting it into the corral. Why is that, Leon?

Tell me only the good things that come to mind when I mention... the waiter.
posted by InfidelZombie at 11:48 AM on December 15, 2021 [12 favorites]

I learned from the disabled people who designed our public education programs that, as bile and syntax mentioned above, people leaving a bunch of uncorralled carts scattered around a parking lot can make it challenging and potentially dangerous for people who use wheelchairs or walkers or other mobility support equipment, or who have balance issues or depth perception issues, or who have partial or full blindness, to navigate a complicated space where they are already having to maneuver carefully around other customers and moving and parked cars.

This is not a "no, but" comment, it is a "yes, and" comment: ironically, I actually found someone leaving a cart in the parking lot to be a benefit once when I was still a little wobbly on my bad knee. I'd taken the bus to the Wegmans' in Brooklyn, but the bus stop was at the far end of the parking lot from the store itself, and I was still a little unsteady on my broken knee and was being a little cautious and freaked out. And then I saw someone had abandoned a shopping cart in the parking lot, all the way back where I was - so I grabbed it, and used it as a walker to finish crossing the parking lot. Hell, I needed a shopping cart anyway, may as well have it serve double-duty.

Although when I was done with it I did put it back in the corral with the others.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:12 PM on December 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

Driving to the store is a large part of why the world is awful.

It's not that driving to the store is awful, it's that the store (and the surrounding city) being designed in such a way to make it difficult and often excessively dangerous for people who are not driving to access the store is awful.

Personally, I've been putting carts back where they belong since my head was about as high as the cart, but I grew up in a very different time when kids were allowed to be out of arm's reach of their parents.
posted by wierdo at 12:19 PM on December 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

If you're at the (now closed) Glendale Kroger in Toledo, Ohio you start a trash fire, flip the cart over the fire and use it as a grill in the parking lot.
posted by charred husk at 12:29 PM on December 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

What's the waiter test?

How far you can throw them.
posted by notyou at 12:53 PM on December 15, 2021

Curious how many former supermarket employees think it was the better part of the job, myself included.

Former supermarket employee here, always hated it, worst part of the job. Maybe it's nicer in places with better weather. As it was, it was usually cold, wet, and windy, and I spent every second I was doing it resenting the predominantly affluent drivers of unnecessarily large cars who were the main offenders in not giving a shit and just leaving them wherever.

Firstly, unlike carrying an empty crisp packet until you see a bin, it's clearly unpaid labour. You have to go out of your way to return it, and it's heavy. Who benefits from the saving of time if the trolley goes back? Not the person collecting it, but their employer: the supermarket.

You know who benefits? Your fellow shoppers, who can now find a cart where they expect to, can find a parking space that is actually clear (and have a clear road to access it), and don't get their car dinged or scratched by errant carts. The world is bigger than you, and the business you're interacting with - there's a whole bunch of other people there, too. It's for their benefit, regardless of who does it.
posted by Dysk at 2:02 PM on December 15, 2021 [18 favorites]

It was interesting watching some Cart Narcs videos (found by following the trail from links upthread) how people who said they were exhausted or disabled found themselves chasing Mr. Cart Narc across the parking lot after he had nagged them enough. Anger has a way of giving us extra powers, I guess?

So far I haven't seen one where someone asks him to help them by putting the cart away for them, but I haven't watched very many yet. I suspect that Youtube is trying to show me the most ~~rage-inducing~~ engaging content.
posted by clawsoon at 2:16 PM on December 15, 2021

Do you know how many plates of beans can fit in one of those carts?

Interesting space-filling problem, here, with some possible consequences for bean-plating.

Smaller cans from your typical grocers (Safeway, Food Lion, Piggly Wiggly, etc.) will be more expensive, but they should pack the same standard cuboid shopping cart more efficiently than larger food-service cans one might get cheaply from a Costco or Walmart.

Paying less per bean means filling fewer plates and thus making repeat trips to the supermarket. What with gas where it is these days, it may be strangely cheaper to make two trips: one to get the larger cans, and then a second trip to get smaller cans to fit in the gaps between the larger cans, thus minimizing overall unused bean-cart volume and maximizing bean-plating.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:30 PM on December 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

for my personal circumstances, it matters to me that I return the cart (and occasionally corral a few along the way)

it really should go without saying, to each their own.. I have no doubt that there are legitimate reasons carts don't get returned, and I also have no doubt that some people could return their cart, and simply decide not to. I don't know if that makes a person 'bad' but it does seem thoughtless and kind of like what a shitty jerk-ass farthead might do
posted by elkevelvet at 3:38 PM on December 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

I don't always return the cart, depending on a number of factors, but if I don't I make sure to put it somewhere safe and where it won't be in anyone's way, damage anyone's car or be too obnoxious for staff to retrieve.

There are often informal clumps of carts in badly laid out lots. A cousin to paths of desire.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:47 PM on December 15, 2021 [5 favorites]

Do you tip the waiter, and if so how much?
posted by The Bellman

I feel like I am somehow being set up here…
posted by Ahmad Khani at 7:54 PM on December 15, 2021 [5 favorites]

Paying less per bean means filling fewer plates and thus making repeat trips to the supermarket. What with gas where it is these days...

This is where we start with the fart jokes, right?
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:19 PM on December 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

Well, it's certainly true that many people can't keep those confined to designated containment areas either...
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:31 PM on December 15, 2021

Do you tip the waiter, and if so how much?

No further than 30° tops. Any more than that and you'd have to get OSHA involved...
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:32 PM on December 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

I will tell you why parents can't leave children to return a cart to the corral - because assholes come and threaten to involve DHHS (or whatever your local children's protection department is) if you do. I love my kids, and I know they are perfectly safe in the car for 30 seconds while I return a cart, but I've had enough people come scream at me to also know it's a risky activity, not because of any physical danger but because of meddling fucks who will leverage the bureaucracy to make your life a misery if you don't comply.
This isn't me responding to a one-off thing - I've been everything from physically threatened ("who here left their children in the car, I'll beat their ass") to politely warned ("It's not like it used to be, you need to watch what you do or people will call the cops").
It's not like I'm off drinking and gambling with my infant stuck in a car seat slowly cooking to death - literally you just walk away from the car with your 7-year-old (who is quite capable to letting themselves out if they should hypothetically get too hot in the half-minute you are gone) in it and before you know it some shit is yelling in your ear about abandoning your kids.
posted by memetoclast at 2:02 AM on December 16, 2021 [8 favorites]

(yet I still usually return my cart, because fuck them)
posted by memetoclast at 2:12 AM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

One of the best parts of joy is positioning yourself as far away from the cart corral as you can, throwing your whole shoulder into pushing the cart towards the corral and doing a little victory dance when the cart slams into the other carts in perfect alignment.
posted by bendy at 2:40 AM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

If you are not able to use the cart and push it around the store in the first place, how do you even have the cart to leave it in the middle of the parking lot?

Well, when my MIL was less mobile, she would white knuckle getting groceries using the cart for balance. I see a number of seniors doing that locally, sometimes with canes in the cart. So it’s more the long walk back without the cart, I’d guess. This being my neighborhood, if people see those seniors they usually run up to help them by returning the cart.

Personally, I've been putting carts back where they belong since my head was about as high as the cart, but I grew up in a very different time when kids were allowed to be out of arm's reach of their parents.

I thought I would encourage this in my kids until I read an article on hood height and visibility for SUVs/trucks. My oldest is now taller than me so he does. But the way people tear around is terrifying at times.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:41 AM on December 16, 2021 [6 favorites]

Also, as a n’er do well adolescent I’d often just launch the cart right at the side of my own crappy car. There’s no way the car could look worse, I was 19 and angry and I got a little rush of power when I did it.
posted by bendy at 2:50 AM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

In my state, it is literally illegal to leave a child under eight unattended in a vehicle for any length of time.

So a parent can wrestle an already bored and cranky kid (or kids) in a parking lot, and risk them being hit by a car, to return the cart and please the moralizing judgy-wudgies.

Or we can strap our kids into their seats, return the cart, and run afoul of the law. And then have the judgy-wudgies try to keep us from leaving and call the cops on us.

Before anyone accuses me of paranoia, there's a streak of people who love nothing more than to harass and scare moms if we seem imperfect in some way.

I've been screamed at and my toddler and I were videoed on our own property because my supervision was deemed insufficient by a complete stranger. We've also been hairy-eyeballed and followed around stores after Tucker Carlson decreed that masks are "child abuse."

It's creepy out there, and it's getting worse.

Some of y'all can give it a rest with the "set an example for your kids" stuff, I'm trying to survive over here. Pretty little moral examples can wait.
posted by champers at 4:35 AM on December 16, 2021 [6 favorites]

> moms

parents, mate, believe me - in some ways it's easier being a father (I get credit for things that would be expected from a mother), and in other ways harder (it's baseline expected that I'm a negligent parent without the slightest clue what's good for my own offspring).
posted by memetoclast at 4:55 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

memetoclast, this is an issue my husband and I talk about a lot, and we've referred to it as "parenting in parallel universes."

He's the Hapless Hero. Endless accolades for doing the bare minimum, but it's assumed he doesn't really know what he's doing and he needs a friendly boost.

It's frustrating, but he simply doesn't exist in the same environment I do.

Due to a confluence of factors, I'm assumed to be harming my child for whatever weird picky reasons the observer has assumed, and I'm under threat of harassment or even the state getting involved, regardless of the fact I'm an excellent mother.
posted by champers at 5:15 AM on December 16, 2021 [4 favorites]

You know who benefits? Your fellow shoppers, who can now find a cart where they expect to, can find a parking space that is actually clear (and have a clear road to access it), and don't get their car dinged or scratched by errant carts. The world is bigger than you, and the business you're interacting with - there's a whole bunch of other people there, too. It's for their benefit, regardless of who does it.

I put my cart back most of the time, but out of the “weeeee!” factor described above (I don’t care that I’m a 45 year old lady person, riding your cart back to the corral is one of the tiny joys that makes life good).

But I really disagree with the idea that we should do the labor of a business because it benefits fellow shoppers. That reasoning suggests we should take over the functions of other labor that a business fails to provide adequately. While the desire to contribute to the common good is a noble one AND an instinctual one, it’s also a false one in this scenario; what you are really contributing to is a business’s bottom line. Change the model to coops and community owned, and you have my agreement.

*Times I don’t put the cart into corral:

no close by one - and I don’t have time for a cart ride. I will park on a curb though so it can’t roll away. Usually if you’re parked to the back of a lot.

When I’m walking on foot. Why did I need a cart then? Well, the store closest to me doesn’t have enough baskets, and fails to put them back at the front of the store frequently. So I leave it just outside the exit door, out of the way of incoming and outgoing shoppers (as do many others, I would guess for similar reasons).

In parking lots where the corrals are overflowing, because fuck Walmart in less affluent neighborhoods that don’t employee enough people to regularly retrieve the carts. Same Walmart’s often don’t have any carts inside. And this isn’t the great resignation labor shortage, I can think of a couple where this has been happening pre-2020

In lots where people drive dangerously fast in the parking lot and I’ve nearly been hit. I’m only willing to go as far as absolutely necessary, and usually those are places I am reluctant to go to for that reason, but sometimes it’s what is closest.

We can argue about how there is a labor shortage fueling a stores ability to have employees retrieve carts, but one of the worst offenders near me has more self checkout lanes than ever, has appeared to reduced staffing since Kroger took over (I cannot say for certain, but it appears there was less staff).

And let’s not forget the complete cluster that the carts with locking wheels have created. I am noticing more stores have these piled up outside rather than fixing. And yet I see so many more carts abandoned outside the home range than I did a few years ago- that might be due to increased homelessness, but it also means the locking mechanism either doesn’t work or is easily defeated.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 6:56 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

Uh. I am a disabled person with three children ages five and under.
I always, always, always put my cart away. I think folks crying "ableism" are being disingenuous.
My life is made considerably harder by carts in the lots. A lot of the time it's because they're occupying the parking spaces I need in order to get in and out. And every disabled parent I know (and I know quite a few) get pissed about this.
Return your cart.
If we can do it, you can do it.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 7:09 AM on December 16, 2021 [6 favorites]

This is similar to the old adage, "if you can't afford to tip you can't afford to eat out."
If you don't have time to return your damned cart you don't have enough time to go shopping. Just plan ahead.
Put your cart away.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 7:10 AM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

I think folks crying "ableism" are being disingenuous.

The spurious fury that this question always generates continues to astonish and amuse. The sheer inventiveness of the elaborate rationalizations and excuses offered by the non-put-away brigade is truly something to behold.

But the simple fact remains that when you have an Aldi and a Woolworths sharing the same car park as my nearest branches do, and the Aldi has coin-in-the-slot locks on its trolleys and the Woolworths doesn't, and all of the abandoned trolleys in the surrounding blocks belong to Woolworths, as do the only store employees ever seen out and about pushing trolley trains, it's perfectly apparent that (a) most people are completely capable of returning their own trolleys and (b) none of the elaborate rationalizations for failing to do so can stand up to the incredible crushing pressure exerted by that $1 trolley deposit.

Sometimes I don't put my Woolworths trolley away. But I usually do, and since I will almost always wheel one or two of them back into the store on my way there from the car, on balance I've put away many more of them than I've used; honour is satisfied.
posted by flabdablet at 7:54 AM on December 16, 2021 [8 favorites]

If my experiences and abilities differ from another disabled parent's, it isn't due to my being "disingenuous."

My reality is real.

If I can return the cart, I return the cart. If an unreturned cart is in my way, I assume that the last person who used it had a good reason. I wish them well and go about my life as best I can.
posted by champers at 7:58 AM on December 16, 2021 [10 favorites]

> what you are really contributing to is a business’s bottom line. Change the model to coops and community owned, and you have my agreement.

To me, that's not really relevant. I don't drop litter on land owned by the state, or by a charity, or by a business, or by a private individual; similarly, I don't discard shopping trolleys after use, in any shop's car-park.
posted by vincebowdren at 8:41 AM on December 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

Carts of Darkness

Murray Siple's feature-length documentary follows a group of homeless men who have combined bottle picking with the extreme sport of racing shopping carts down the steep hills of North Vancouver.

Trailer yt and full-length film yt on Youtube (the latter might be region-restricted to Canada).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:58 AM on December 15
I watched this last night, what a great docu. And not region restricted, not here in Austin anyways.

Thx for posting!
posted by dancestoblue at 11:26 AM on December 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

I always, always, always put my cart away. I think folks crying "ableism" are being disingenuous.

As I said in my comment on this matter, I have a chronic pain condition which completely changed how I see this matter. As I also said, I always put my cart away, but I can really viscerally understand why people might not, in a way I didn't understand before I developed this condition. I was not being disingenuous, and I have no idea why someone would make that assumption. Why on earth would I lie about this? What could I possibly stand to gain?

Maybe it's just that people with different abilities and different life experiences have different perspectives on this matter.
posted by lunasol at 12:13 PM on December 16, 2021 [9 favorites]

After reading the thread I now fully understand the shopping cart test.

Good people give the benefit of the doubt to those who do not return carts, can empathize with people with different life experiences, and without judgement sometimes corral and arrange stray carts.

I think everyone would benefit by reading about the Fundamental Attribution Error or Correspondence Bias, and taking a look the Principle of Charity. Making a conscious effort to remember this every day has made me a less angry and happier person.
posted by Dr. Curare at 8:45 AM on December 17, 2021 [13 favorites]

If the store has provided a reasonably convenient corral, I'll return it. If they can't be bothered, I can't be bothered either. I do of course put it somewhere secure where it won't roll around to damage anyone else. People can bitch about the "meaning" of it all they like.
posted by tavella at 1:29 PM on December 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

it's perfectly apparent that (a) most people are completely capable of returning their own trolleys

No. What's apparent is that someone returned the trolleys, not necessarily always the same people who checked them out.

The internet: [thing that's obviously meant as a bit of casual fun]

MetaFilter: [LEADEN SERIOUSNESS]

Your "casual fun" is someone else's pain. As an able-bodied white male, you don't quite get what it feels like to be told that yet another statement that demeans or erases your existence is all in good fun.

The invalidating of people's lived experiences going on in this thread is not worthy of Metafilter. You can and should do better than to assume that because your experience of the world is X, so is everyone else's, and if they say otherwise they are "disingenuous".
posted by Flock of Cynthiabirds at 2:24 PM on December 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

What's apparent is that someone returned the trolleys, not necessarily always the same people who checked them out.

Yeah, nah. The way the coin locks work is that your trolley retains your dollar coin, which you can retrieve only by poking in a linking key that's chained to the back of the trolley in front of yours. This usually happens after parking your trolley back in the corral, but it would also work just fine if you found another trolley abandoned nearby in the car park and hooked up to that one instead.

Doesn't happen. There just aren't little bunches of mated Aldi trolleys left lying around in the carpark or adjacent streets with a dollar coin abandoned in the front one. Only Woolworths trolleys, with their distinctive red handles.

And sure, in theory people could be abandoning their Aldi trolley and letting somebody else wheel it back to the corral to get the dollar out, but I've been shopping at that store for fifteen years now and I've never once seen that happen. People do just make the trip back to the Aldi corral after unloading their Aldi trolleys at their cars. The nearby Woolworths corrals? Not so much.

The fact that not needing to abandon one dollar is demonstrably adequate compensation for the inconvenience of returning a trolley to the storefront corral clearly shows just how minor that inconvenience is, and just how spurious is the fuss being made about it in this thread and others similar.
posted by flabdablet at 3:30 PM on December 17, 2021

I’ve literally never been to Aldi without offering my cart to another customer going in as I was going out.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:44 PM on December 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'd suspect the main driver of difference may be people picking up carts as they come in to save themselves the bother of having to dig out change for the corral. Which still makes the deposit useful, but not necessarily in the way you think.
posted by tavella at 5:01 PM on December 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

$1 isn't a lot of money sure but if we have people in this thread telling us that they don't put their carts away because grocery shopping is already a hardship then making people in similar situations return their cart to get a dollar back could also show how much they need that dollar and is really adding an indignity on top of the hardship they're already facing. I have no excuse not to return my cart and if I don't then I'm doing a bad act but I'm lucky in that I'm healthy and don't live in a place where I can't leave my kids in the car while I return the cart.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:28 PM on December 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

Or disabled people don’t shop at Aldi as much. I don’t because the selection is limited and rarely accommodates my special dietary needs (which disabled people often have a lot of), I struggle to bag my own groceries, and I never remember to bring change for the carts or my own bags. The ones I’ve been in have also been small and cramped, so not ideal for wheelchairs, and while I don’t use one currently the association is still there. It’s small stuff but builds up to me never considering Aldi even though it’s cheaper—the discomfort associated with shopping there just takes it off my mental list entirely.

In fact I had entirely forgotten there was one in town until this thread, despite passing it at least once a week or so.
posted by brook horse at 7:30 PM on December 17, 2021 [7 favorites]

no.

I've been following this thread from the beginning, and I have to conclude that no, I'm not a good person. For some reason or other.

I guess I'll adjust my aspirations toward being at least okay.
posted by philip-random at 8:46 PM on December 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

Really not a good person.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:21 PM on December 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

My town has a Save-a-Lot, which does a cart deposit. It's in the same lot as a Dollar General, which does not have a deposit.

People will fail to return carts from either store, and I see carts from either store scattered about town on occasion.

It seems weird to say, "OH BUT MY TOWN HAS XYZ SETUP AND THEREFORE THIS IS TRUE EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME."

But at least it's not as actively demeaning as, "Disabled parents who say their experiences are different from mine must be lying," so I guess there's that.

Shrug.

Maybe the real "test" is whether you can acknowledge the parking lots beyond your own existence.

Or maybe it's whether you can learn to see a world beyond cute little pass-fail "tests."

The test is that there was never a test at all.
posted by champers at 5:04 AM on December 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

I’m really late to this party, and this is a total tangent, but my favorite piece of pithy moral wisdom for ostensibly assessing people’s integrity, which has stuck with me far longer than whatever media product I got it from as a kid, is “a man who cheats at solitaire will cheat at anything.” Yeah, it’s a little dated now that people don’t pull out a deck of cards when they get bored anymore, but to me it really captures the distinctions around performative morality, and it isn’t really about assessing other people at all, because the point is that what you choose to do when nobody’s looking, with no stakes of any kind, stripped of all the confounds of meaningful self-interest, is your essential character.

I definitely don’t go around looking for other people playing card games and police them on it, but oddly I genuinely think that little phrase has made me a better person as an adult. It’s probably why I’m the sort who, all else being equal, puts carts away.

And it’s been kind of a long walk to get here, but I think there’s another interesting distinction to be made here between moral razors for deciding whether you yourself are good versus whether other people are bad. I’m certainly as guilty as anyone of focusing a little too much on the latter.
posted by gelfin at 8:34 AM on December 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

champers: Maybe the real "test" is whether you can acknowledge the parking lots beyond your own existence.

The real test were the carts we returned along the way.
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:04 AM on December 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

“a man who cheats at solitaire will cheat at anything.”

You can't cheat at solitaire. Instead you've invented a new game with a different rule set sanctioned by all active players.
posted by Mitheral at 9:26 AM on December 18, 2021 [9 favorites]

I inherited fucked-up myelin sheathing, and that means that random parts of my body just >blip!< go partially offline for weeks at a time for various reasons but usually because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time while I slept. This month it's my right foot and left hand. They're not entirely useless, just noticeably less capable at the moment. So I was in the fucking Fresh Market, a store I hate but where my dying father insists I get all his groceries because the lighting is expensively nice and they play strings while you shop and everything is marked up to the sky, therefore the food must be better. The checker, clearly under middlemanagementmandate, did the thing where they hand you your money and your huge long receipt and leave your bags all over the counter so that they can more quickly get to harassing the person behind you about whether or not they found everything they needed, implying that you need to GTFO, preferably many long moments ago, so that they can meet their daily quota of checked-through shoppers. I fumbled the receipt, the money, and the bags just long enough to be an annoyance to the person behind me and the checker, and I thought of this thread. Then I footdropped along out to the parking lot and the corral was in a loosely packed state so, again thinking of this thread, I used my cart to bash the carts in front of it into tighter formation so that more carts could fit into the corral. In this way I cancelled out the inconvenience I caused with my disability-related fumblings at the cash register by reducing future cart-returners' inconvenience at the corral, and I helped Fresh Market continue their long tradition of paying many fewer people much much less to do much much more. A HOLIDAY MIRACLE!
posted by Don Pepino at 9:27 AM on December 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

Not to disrupt the abacus clicking in the Good and Bad Place accounting departments, but just dropping in to also signal boost the Carts of Darkness documentary. Beyond the obvious cart connection, there's its own resonance about not making harsh assumptions about the structure and challenges of other, largely invisible, lives.

Thanks to mandolin conspiracy for bringing it up!
posted by Drastic at 9:58 AM on December 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

I helped Fresh Market continue their long tradition of paying many fewer people much much less to do much much more

This is a perspective I just don't get. You helped make some employees' loads a little lighter - it's not like management would've paid to put more people on it you didn't, the service would just be worse and the staff more overworked. It's like refusing to tip because that just enables employers to keep underpaying wait staff. A problem has been correctly identified, but refusing to continue to help ameliorate said problem seems a weird response to that? Like a really small-scale accelerationism.
posted by Dysk at 10:22 AM on December 18, 2021

Found a non-NYT link for the Shopping Cart Killer.

"After he inflicts trauma to his victims and kills them, he transports their bodies to their final resting place, literally, in a shopping cart," Davis said.

Definitely the winner for worst shopping cart person ever.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:06 PM on December 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

that we know of.
posted by philip-random at 1:13 PM on December 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

“a man who cheats at solitaire will cheat at anything.”

That one is *even dumber*. When I was a kid and played solitaire, I'd usually try to win with one set of rules, but if a game was stuck I'd switch from say pick-3 to pick-1 to see if it was solvable at all. Or see if I could solve it if I could put cards other than a king in blank spaces, etc. It was part of the fun; can you find a set of rules that worked?
posted by tavella at 1:49 PM on December 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

fucked-up myelin sheathing, and that means that random parts of my body just >blip!< go partially offline for weeks at a time for various reasons but usually because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time while I slept

how do I google this

Edit: this overview was informative.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:55 PM on December 18, 2021

Definitely the winner for worst shopping cart person ever.

But did he return the cart after?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:40 PM on December 18, 2021

No, he did not.

No dollar deposit on it.
posted by flabdablet at 9:21 PM on December 18, 2021

All this talk of cheating at Solitaire reminds me of an episode of Maverick. Bret and Bart are playing two-handed poker on a train, and Bret’s neighbor (Roger Moore in a guest role before he joined the regular cast) whispers to him, “I think you ought to know this fellow’s cheating you.”

Bret replies matter-of-factly, “Of course he is. It’s his deal.”
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:48 PM on December 18, 2021

It's like refusing to tip because that just enables employers to keep underpaying wait staff. A problem has been correctly identified, but refusing to continue to help ameliorate said problem seems a weird response to that? Like a really small-scale accelerationism.

I guess it's kind of like refusing to tip except that I wrangled my own cart and the carts of other shoppers to make things easier on the employees, so if you're reading supersuperclosely for the subtleties, you'll see it's also like the complete opposite of refusing to tip.

Why am I not allowed to observe and comment upon evidence of corporate Scroogery? I'm not supposed to notice that Fresh Market is overworking staff? I can't notice that, because they refuse to hire and then pay well and then treat decently the additional people that would, far better than the glittery lighting and the Vivaldi, improve the experience for everybody, their employees have to to rush customers to keep the lines from building up and there's unbridled cart mayhem in the parking lot?
posted by Don Pepino at 6:59 AM on December 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

It occurs to me that instead of commenting here, I could complain instead to stores who do not have enough staff.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:25 AM on December 19, 2021

Our Kroger has had no carts available inside for a couple months, but there were always employees standing in the foyer. I realized on Friday that they are enforcing masking in the store, and there need to be 2 of them because this is Georgia and people suck. So we can't have carts because Republicans. I'm sure those employees would much rather be outside collecting carts
posted by hydropsyche at 7:40 AM on December 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

I guess it's kind of like refusing to tip except that I wrangled my own cart and the carts of other shoppers to make things easier on the employees

Sorry, I just picked your comment to quote when skimming back through the thread - the same sentiment has been used as a reason to not do any cart wrangling in this thread.
posted by Dysk at 9:02 AM on December 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have a colleague who cheats at solitaire and I always try to get him on my team when we do stupid icebreaker games at staff meetings because I know that a person who cheats when there is no prize will go all out when a $5 Starbucks card is a possibility. So far, the free cold brew has been delicious.
posted by betweenthebars at 3:47 PM on December 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

« Older JEANS ARE MADE OF LIES! | Sooner or later, it had to be done Newer »

This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments

MetaFilter

Are you a good person?
December 14, 2021 12:24 PM Subscribe

Tags

Share

Are you a good person? December 14, 2021 12:24 PM Subscribe

Tags

Share

Are you a good person?
December 14, 2021 12:24 PM Subscribe