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I saw someone leave their cart next to their car and get back in the car. So I grabbed it and put it in the corral a few spaces away. That person drove back through the parking lot to tell me to “mind my own business”. I still get a little schadenfreude about how upset they were over their own conscience and perceived social judgement.
Tbh I would have put it right behind their car lol
“Be a better person”. Hold onto that one for the next time this happens. It never will though.
“Mind your own business” is such a perfect encapsulation of how completely incapable of self-reflection that person must be.
The cart was no longer their business, but yours. So not only couldn’t they recognise that the judgment they felt came from within, they projected that feeling outwards so hard they ended up sticking their nose into your business about it.
That’s how they avoid learning basic life lessons like, “I should return the cart,” because as soon as they hit the “I should” part they freak out and make it everyone else’s problem.
I mostly shop at a place where you can safely leave the carts on a covered sidewalk outside of the store. Get fucked moral absolutists
Safely, but still creating more work for store employees to collect the carts and possibly inconveniencing pedestrians. Point 1 for the moral absolutists.
It’s surprising to me US carts don’t have to be unlocked by a coin (which you get back when you lock your cart again), it’s like that in every supermarket I know in France and Germany and probably many other European countries.
You can misbehave but it costs you a little bit, and if you do someone has the opportunity to make a buck off you by cleaning after you.
In fairness, that’s been phased out in many places.
I suspect less out of faith in humanity and more out of the reality that many people don’t carry cash, much less change, anymore and they kept annoying the cashiers.
Yeah it’s hard to justify carrying coins around, they’re not worth much, whereas euro coins still carry some value (1€/2€).
When I arrived in NYC a few years ago, I got cash from the ATM and then tried to take a bus to our airbnb in Brooklyn, it was $2.75 per ticket, only payable in coins… like we’d have 44 quarters in our pockets :-)
The busses don’t take metro card? I’ve only ever ridden the subway in NYC.
I keep a few quarters in my car for ALDI specifically. If I forget: I don’t get a cart and put the groceries in my reusable bags. Or nab those giant cardboard containers ALDI employees stock with and leave around.
Stores have tried it. Customers hate it. Chiefly because many people simply don’t carry any coins on them. You can’t have all of your store’s registers set to card only mode (yes this is very common for some reason) and then expect people to have a coin on them at all times, so they don’t bother.
It also seems trivially easy to circumvent. Easier than remembering to bring a quarter with you when you go to the store.
I had never seen that before in my entire life until an Aldi opened here.
A long time ago I worked at a grocery store and I preferred it when people didn’t return the carts. Would you rather spend your day gathering carts outside or gathering carts for 10 minutes at a time and then having to deal with customers?
I’m just curious, did you bring the carts in in smaller batches so you’d have to make more trips and the whole task would take longer?
Depends on the weather
Every time I fail to return a shopping cart on a beautiful spring day, the grocery store’s Cart Gatherer thanks me kindly and calls, “Thank you kind citizen for giving me leave to leave the hellhole that I was stuck in because the world is filled with assholes who are stealing my job! I want to be in the sunlight! Don’t take that from me!!”
This is such a dumb take - doing unpaid labour for corporations is what makes someone a good person? Nah.
That’s a weird take. The shopping part is provided to you for free for your convenience. Not returning the shopping cart means you are creating a nuisance for other people who are coming to the store to get the things that they need. It is blocking parking spots, potentially going to damage somebody’s car, and no longer in a centralized location.
Not returning it is inconsiderate in multiple ways.
Nah, yours is the dumb take. I guess returning your 3D glasses at the end of a movie is too much “unpaid labor” for you. How about cleaning up your table at a restaurant that doesn’t have servers? I guess you just leave the mess sitting there huh?
Working a customer facing job with poor pay and little to no benefits sucks. That’s why I do it, for those people, not the business.
I prefer the Gom Jabbar but the Shopping Cart seems like a viable alternative.
Gom Jabbar always seemed like a pointless task. Are you “human” by being able to willingly withstand physical pain? Some people have higher pain tolerances and willpower; doesn’t make them beasts.
I think the idea was that you knew that it’sa test and that you’d die if you remove the hand, so it’s less willpower and more reasoning over instinct/fear, at least in theory. You have to presume the box is at least tuned to different people’s pain thresholds or whatever.
Also, the text pretty much says that Mohiam is doing it wrong more or less on purpose:
“Enough,” the old woman muttered. “Kull wahad! No woman child ever withstood that much. I must’ve wanted you to fail.”
If you give the benefit of the doubt that Herbert figured out the practicalities and wasn’t going by rule of cool (which he absolutely was) the implication is that the person administering the test has some control of the itnensity and you’re supposed to deal with some pain you’re supposed to hold, not become convinced that your hand is a charred stump like Paul is.
That, and the movie verisons amp the whole thing up a lot, so it comes across a bit differently.
It was always more about the triumph of the mind over the body. When the body is screaming to run away, the mind retains control. That is what makes someone Human.
It’s an interesting definition of humanity, but certainly not a definitive one.
prints this image out a million times and attaches it to every shopping cart I can find
Why not use the European system where you have to use a coin to unlock the cart from the stack. If people leave the cart out some kid or hobo will return it eventually.
You can and will replace the coin with something worthless of equal shape and size.
As an American, coins are already basically worthless.
Some stores in the US do this, most notably Aldi. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, especially in an increasingly cashless society.
Names a European store.
They sell like coin shaped discs you can put on your keyring, dunno if that’s a thing in the US though.
Yes, I know Aldi started in Europe.
My point was, they have stores in the US, and their stores in the US also do this. Which is unusual for US stores. Trader Joe’s, for example (which is also owned by one of the Aldi companies) just has regular carts without the coin chain things.
Trader Joe’s was created when the two brothers who inherited Aldi could not decide on whether to sell cigarettes. One remained in Europe, and the other moved to California and started Trader Joe’s. They are not currently affiliated.
That’s not correct, actually. There were two brothers who inherited Aldi, and they did have a falling out over cigarettes, but they actually split the company in two - Aldi Nord (North) and Aldi Sud (South). As the names imply, they operate the Aldi stores in North and South Germany respectively.
In other countries, either Aldi Nord or Aldi Sud operates the Aldi stores, but they do not directly compete with each other. The exception is the US, where Aldi Sud operates the Aldi stores and Aldi Nord operates Trader Joe’s (which the original owner of Aldi bought from Joe Coulombe in 1979).
Huh, that sounds familiar too. Looks like I screwed this up last time I researched the history of Trader Joe’s for some post like this.
They give those out at the shop info where I live
I mean, yeah. Aldi is European but has locations in the US. They’re the only store here that does this afaik. I’ve never seen the keyring thing but sincw no other stores need a coin I’d have to shop at Aldi a lot to justify ordering one online.
It was tongue in cheek. But it does make sense a European chain would bring that over to the US.
My local aldi does this and still when I get there I find like 3 trolleys scattered around the tiny carpark. I can only grab like two max to take with me to the pen.
Yeah. For a lot of people a quarter is nothing and worth tossing for the convenience of not being a decent person.
Fine, they can subsidize the cart retrieval employee cost.
Also I discussed this with someone in the UK once and they pay an entire pound for a cart… we do quarters because it’s the largest denomination common coin in the US.
Because we’re not savages, and can return the carts like a civilized society.
“Civilized”
So civilized in fact, there are monetized YouTube channels dedicated to catching & shaming people for not returning their carts.
So it’s kind of like the European system in a way. Instead of getting a coin for returning an abandoned shopping cart, you can get a subscriber count & ad revenue!
That cart narc guy is absolutely obnoxious. Sure I get his angle, and perhaps some people need to be shamed into doing the right thing, but I’m amazed no one has run him over yet.
He had a firearm pulled on him once actually, he walked away very quickly while continuing the bit haha
So civilised.
Yeah I think I saw that, a contractor in his work van in Texas I believe
Can we just use the nordic system where people are not fucking savages and bring their carts back? I hate people who don’t return their carts but I hate even more when I need coins to unlock the cart. I haven’t carried coins since 2014.
I live in a Nordic country, we have carts which need a coin, most people have a thing on their keychain to unlock a cart, majority of carts are returned.
Some might think it’s the price for a cheap shopping cart. In German there was a comedian who did a prank call at a store, telling them he bought 500 carts for 500€ and use them as rabbit cages.
German
ComedianThe math ain’t mathing here.
Oh of course the Europeans have done it better than us
This is how it is at about half the big grocery stores where I live in Canada
Food Maxx in the U.S. employed this in low income areas to prevent cart thefts. So, that’s nice.
If you want to prevent theft then I feel like 50 cents deposit isn’t going to cut it
Wait is that an european only thing?
But I gotta get my quid back.
This one Aldis.
It’s basically standard (at least everywhere I’ve lived) in Europe
Every supermarket has this in the UK. Has for years.
What if, hear me out, you return it where you found it? But, but, I found it in the back of the parking lot next to where I parked.
Neutral good?
Counterpoint:
The Wholefoods in Redmond, Wa is known as Hellfoods by their employees because of how cold people are there and how overbearing management can be. It also is in one of the most beautiful parts of the country. When I worked there, I love the warm summer evenings when I could go out to the outfield to fetch a cart because I got to be outside and no longer under the micromanagement that is retail.
When I would clock off, sometimes I’d nab a cart and send it out on purpose for the guy behind me to give them an escape.
Did every other employee feel the same way as you? Because otherwise that’s not a counterpoint.
But you could say the same for the original premise- not every employee hates getting rogue carts, in fact many like getting them.
I gave an anecdotal point, but the broader argument simply questions one of the assumptions of OP.
Their job is already to gather carts from the corrals. Putting carts in the corrals allows employees to gather carts if they enjoy it without it being an extra inconvenience if they have a time limit. Also like 99% of employees would say they dislike people who leave carts everywhere, especially when they, you know, are a threat to cars if they roll into someone’s vehicles, hence why cart corrals are a thing in the first place. I certainly don’t want carts taking up parking spaces or rolling into my car if it gets windy.
I’ve been on both sides of this and it really depends on what management is expecting at the time. If “cart run” is a considered a task unto itself then it can be bliss, but if you’re short staffed then management starts to look at “cart run” as a means to an end. When the expectation becomes that you’ll be back on register in 10-15 minutes (but all the corrals out front are now full and no customers are complaining about it), then all those wayward carts mean you gotta hustle.
When I eventually found myself in a supervisory role, I remembered that and tried to equitably rotate between everybody that I knew liked doing carts (or offer when I could tell someone was getting burnt out/long day and needed to go outside for a while) and just let them do their thing. Mostly people really appreciated that and in those cases it was gratifying to be the cool supervisor, but I hated that my responsibility had become to ensure that the front carts were acceptably full at any given time rather than to gather the carts – all it takes is a random rush and suddenly there are no carts and a micromanagey shift lead is chewing you out because they only appear at moments like these (or immediately after the rush while everyone is catching their breath to ask why you can’t find something to do) and your guy outside was just standing in the back of the lot smoking a cigarette, the shift lead doesn’t care that there were carts mere minutes before they arrived on the floor, nor that he only just started that cig after gathering all the carts strewn into bushes and discarded between cars or down the sidewalk…
god I don’t miss retail lol
I have very young children, meaning very often I can walk away from the car after getting them in their carseats and unloading the groceries or whatever and be gone for about two minutes before one or both of them start losing their minds and getting scared. If the shopping cart return spot is more than two minutes from my car (round trip), then the cart gets left exactly two minutes (round trip) closer to the return spot and in a spot that doesn’t inconvenience a) anyone parking, b) anyone leaving, and c) the employee that will eventually have to return it to the store.
Ideally, I catch someone walking inside the store on my way and ask if they’d like the cart, but not always.
That’s just how it is, I don’t feel bad about it. I don’t know if you all live somewhere where these cart return chutes are more available, but most large parking lots here are the size of like two football fields and they have three total return chutes.
What irritates me is how often the “parent parking” spots are filled with people that get into their cars with no kids. They are typically located right next to the chutes, and it is great because you don’t have to walk short children through a parking lot, you can put them in a cart, and then walk in where cars backing out can see the little kids.
I seriously rarely see people with kids using those spots. 100% some of the people in this thread are using the parent parking spots without kids, returning their shopping cart right next to where they’re parked, and then judging people for not returning their carts.
I’m not judging you, but to offer another perspective to anyone reading this thread: I am a parent of two young children, and have never not returned a shopping cart. I take the kids with me when I return it.
As a parent, I realizes that it’s harder to do things with kids than without, but I go out of my way to not pass that burden onto others.
There are many ways our situations could be different that would make it harder for you to do this than me - your reasons are completely your business.
I hear you, but in a busy parking lot, the shopping cart elevates the height of the children, making them visible to cars.
Where I live, the grocery store and target or whatever are primarily SUVs and trucks. The blind spots on vehicles like that are huge, and my children suddenly decide something looks and interesting and will sometimes just bolt off.
They’re pretty good in parking lots, and obviously we have to and do walk through them, but, when I can, I try to limit the time my children spend on their feet in a busy parking lot.
My daughter barely comes up to the bumper of some of these trucks! But I do appreciate what you’re saying, and I tend to agree with you in most circumstances.
I don’t know why you’re catching so much flak. Parking lots are not safe places for kids, and you can’t leave them alone in the car for long either. I’ve never had an issue returning a cart, but that’s because I’ve never shopped at a place where the return corrals are that sparse. If it’s over a minute’s walk to return a cart then that’s a failure of the parking lot architects, not you. You’re doing what you can, which is good enough.
I disagree with returning the shopping cart being an act of free will. There is a lot of societal pressure to do it for some people, or to not do it for some other people. And there is always the risk that someone who you know will walk see you not returning, and tell all your friends about it. Or want if your boss happens to see you? What would happen then?
So yeah, better quickly return it. Better than having to deal with all these unknowns.
I return the shopping cart entirely out of the fact that ai fucking hate it when people leave the cart in the parking space. But yeah if theres a concrete sidewalk or something I may leave it there if the return area is a row of cars away.
