It is truly a marker of good vs bad people as
far as it comes to participating in a high trust
society.
Do you ever grab one of those "stranded" shopping carts on the way in to the store?
A lot of societal issues can't be cured merely by doing the right thing ourselves. Littering can't be solved merely by not littering - somebody has to pick up litter. (A lot of litter is the result of wind blowing over trashcans and such, so even in a society where nobody intentionally litters, there will be litter)
Murder can't be solved merely by not murdering people - if you witness a murder, you need to do something about it, not just think "well, at least I don't murder people" and continue with your day.
Shopping cart logistics are obviously many orders of magnitude less serious than murder, but I think it's a similar class of problem/solution.
But now and then I find one of the electric ride-a-carts and that’s the reward for all my work; riding the scootypuff jr in to the glorious chords of … the Walmart theme song.
I lived in several European countries for many years. I then moved to the US a few years ago.
The US strikes me as a less civilised country, in the sense that people, on average don't return the shopping cart. In the first year after I moved, I kept returning the shopping cart, but, after seeing many others not do it, I stopped. I stopped even though I agree it is the right thing to do because I felt like a fool every time I did it. Other people decided their time is too important to return the cart, so why should I be the sucker who does it?
This isn't the only example of uncivilised behaviour I've noticed in the US. Here are other examples: bypassing a long queue of cars only to merge into the lane at the last possible second, skipping red lights if no cars are around, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and forcing other to walk around me, not saying "you're welcome", not giving up my seat on public transportation to e.g. old people, littering.
Every time I see someone break these markers of civilised society, makes me less likely to abide by them next time.
If everyone did this the jams would flow faster, according to WSDOT.
* The time spent adjacent to the traffic lane should be used calibrating your speed with the speed of traffic, once you're at the front you should then be able to merge into an open spot without causing any change to the speed of the cars behind you. So many times I see people zip quickly to the front then merge in and slam on their brakes, causing an extra delay to ripple back through traffic. Some people do this at the beginning of the merge lane which is even worse.
* Once you get there you should endeavor to zipper merge so multiple cars aren't trying to squeeze into one spot. As a corollary, if you're already in the lane that's being merged into you should leave an open space big enough for one vehicle to enter at this point, or better yet consider leaving the lane entirely.
* And by that I mean leave the lane to move deeper into the highway, don't exit into the merging lane just to zip ahead and cut back in, this decidedly does not improve traffic flows.
It's about reducing queue length (you use 2 lanes instead of one, so the queue length is halved) and smaller speed differences between cars on adjacent lanes.
I can't find a good WSDOT source, but here's Minesotta: https://www.dot.state.mn.us/trafficeng/workzone/doc/When-lat...
Anyway, I'm not talking about cases where one lane is closed (which is what WSDOT and the Minesotta doc talk about). I'm talking about cases where there is a one lane offroad from the highway, with a queue of cars waiting to take it. Plenty of people will skip the entire queue and try to merge right at the end, blocking half of their own lane while waiting for a gap in the queue.
You can change straight/right/left here and it all holds. Zipper merges are for merges, when 2 lanes of traffic become one, and everyone merging early is a little bit worse. Above is just selfish.
Because it's the right thing to do.
You maybe are making yourself part of the 1% who don't return their cart (or my locale is better than average at returning it)
You really are a fool. Who willingly gives up the chance to get some free exercise and feel morally superior? I'm over here happily returning others' shopping carts, not just my own, and basking in the knowledge of how I'm a better human being than you maest.
people, on average don't return the shopping cart
I'm nearly 50 and have been to many, many parking lots including some truly forsaken ones. The parking lot at the Walmart near me is a travesty. People dump trash on the ground there, and I don't mean simple littering. It's so gross. It makes you feel like society is crumbling and that civilization was perhaps a mistake in the first place.
And yet...
I just returned from a quick trip there several minutes ago. I naturally thought of this thread (because I'm insane) while traversing the parking lot. I counted four unreturned carts, and several dozen properly corralled carts. The ratio was at least 10:1, possibly more.
This isn't "my" Walmart, but here's one near me that's notorious for being a bit of a Mad Max situation. If you switch to satellite view, you can see that even here the coralled carts seem to greatly outnumber the stranded ones.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/uWE4wfydda7KtT2W8
bypassing a long queue of cars only to merge into the lane
at the last possible second
Anecdotally I've heard that our drivers are nowhere near the worst, but I don't have firsthand experience.
Not sure if you're from the US, but the problem is objectively not as bad here as people say. If you look at various Walmarts (usually these are reliably some of the worst parking lots in any given area) in Google Maps (switch to satellite view) the reality is that the vast majority of people here actually do return their carts properly.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/uWE4wfydda7KtT2W8
https://maps.app.goo.gl/rCBrJKebU33rMq8J6
https://maps.app.goo.gl/5o4GksqTGahBkU816
The last one is by far the worst one I found.
Of course. They're typically more convenient than the carts that have been properly returned.
Nope.
..but that's because I have my own cart I bring to the store.
Being nice to a waiter doesn't require additional work. Also, being a jerk to the waiter hurts another human being directly and is a strategic error because it is more likely to cause them to spit in your food than it is to get you better service.
In contrast, leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly. It just makes a supermarket run slightly less efficiently.
This could theoretically raise prices by increasing labor requirements, but it's not a linear relationship. Failing to return a cart would only increase prices if enough people do it to cross the threshold at which they would need to have an additional cart-collecting employee.
It's still an anti-social behavior, but the impact is more nebulous.
Found a cart leaver. :)
I would count on the waiter not being a jerk, and trying to hurt people just because they are a jerk.
> In contrast, leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly. It just makes a supermarket run slightly less efficiently.
What? It is hardly any extra work, you also have walked the same way when taking the cart. And it annoys people after you, including yourself, when you come in the next day and find a shopping cart standing on your parking lot.
> Being nice to a waiter doesn't require additional work.
Maintaining a social interaction is intellectual more work, than pushing a cart around. This very much depends on your personal preference, to some people social interactions are a lot of work.
> Failing to return a cart would only increase prices if enough people do it to cross the threshold at which they would need to have an additional cart-collecting employee.
So you rely on all the other people not taking liberties, you should be allowed to do? What do you think you are?
It depends on the store. If it's a very large parking lot, and you're parked at the far end of it, it can be a long walk to get back to your car. If the store didn't bother putting any designated cart-return locations in the lot (which happens a lot), then returning the cart means doubling your walking time. So it really is a lot of extra work, or at least time, so it is understandable why some people would avoid this extra work/time and take the easy way out.
>And it annoys people after you
Yes, but you don't ever see these people; they come after you've left. It's not like being rude to the waiter's face.
You can make an argument that it's different because the stuff being measured is at the other end of the "how easily can they change it" spectrum but that doesn't change the fundamental accuracy of the correlation. Something like this shouldn't be used for anything serious.
One thing I want to point out is that everyone I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts. The employees saw it as a mini-break from the drudgery of the day.
From having to go get carts many times, I will say, that if someone leaves their cart in a parking spot... well that is bad behavior. But if they just push it into the grass, or out of the way, who cares if it is tucked away there, or tucked away at cart corral. Someone has to go out and get the carts anyway, and it broke up the day, got you outside.
Unless you're "having kids" in the sense that you're about to give birth to one, saving 30-60 seconds isn't going to make a difference in your day. It's like trying to optimize your travel timing so you can stop at fewer red lights. Maybe it gives someone the illusion of efficiency, but no one is really saving any time.
Most people who leave carts don't mind them blocking others' paths. If you're going out of your way to push one over the curb and into the muddy grass, you might as well have parked it in the designated spot by now.
Where I am, large enough stores have dedicated "outside" employees, most of whose time is be spent pushing carts. For them it's not a fun change of pace, it's just their job. If everyone put their carts back in an orderly fashion, they would need to do less weaving in parking lot traffic and trudging through horrible weather than they otherwise have to. Sure, "it's their job", but I don't want to make it even harder, especially considering how much they tend to be paid.
Funny how peoples' attitude toward retail employees probably wouldn't extend to more work being created for them in their work.
Sometimes you can't park without getting out of the car to clean up after other people, because carts are littering the parking spaces. (Including being pushed from adjacent spots into handicap spaces.)
I've parked near corrals and had people half-ass push them next to it, effectively double parking me until I removed several carts.
I've had to jump out of the way of carts being whipped down an aisle by a strong wind in a storm.
Nobody's talking about bringing carts back to the building, but doing the bare minimum of putting them in the corrals. Failing to do so is saying you value your minor convenience over other peoples' time, property and health. Tucking them on a curb is saying you know you're doing a bad thing but don't really care.
That said
> But if they just push it into the grass, or out of the way,
One marker of whether something is acceptable in society(or having a functioning brain, at times) is to ask oneself "what would happen if everyone did what I'm doing." This applies to most things...littering, talking on speakerphone or blasting music in public, etc. I think this example would similarly fail this test, imagining hundreds of carts piled up somewhere 'out of the way.'
Except for particularly busy times, I don't think you'd see major pile ups.
But I generally agree with what you are saying. It's a valuable question to ask "what if everyone did this".
On days with a strong wind it is more important to rerun the cart, because leaving it loose will mean it’s likely to hit someone’s car. This is when the golden rule comes into play.
Only thing that's more insufferable is the keyboard warriors loosing sleep over tiny things like that.
He got two fishes and five loaves delivered in a clear door dash advertisement.
Like it's pre-loading being an asshole. I hate it. Have your bad day in a way that doesn't continue the dominoes falling and causing other bad days, however much misery loves company.
We had some woods and a little stream next to the parking lot. Some people would chuck the carts into the woods. That’s probably considered bad behavior, but for me, that was just more time I could spend outside and a little adventure to fetch the cart and get it back up the hill through the trees.
I could see working at a big store where you’re expected to bring in 50 carts at a time to be annoying. I was at a smaller places and would only bring in 5 or 6 at a time. Some of the managers would get annoyed at that, but I was getting minimum wage and was the only person who didn’t complain about the cold and snow, so they could just deal with my pace. I wanted to make sure I could control what I was pushing, so I didn’t hurt anyone or break anything. We don’t even have a rope, like I see most places have now.
Sounds terrible but the owner didn't mind, or at least didn't discourage it. Those people didn't have cars and if they had to carry groceries home by hand they'd just buy less groceries or perhaps not shop there at all. He would just drive a pickup truck to the apartment building at the end of the day to collect carts.
When he began the story I thought it was about to be a racist story about "low-income" people (bit of a barely-disguised dog whistle there) but it wound up being pretty cool. An ad-hoc system that worked to everybody's benefit.
It is an inconvenience though, even if as insignificant as an eyesore for others, or the landscaper who may need to remove shopping carts from the planter to do their work.
You could apply similar logic to people who carelessly throw trash in the recycling bin or on a sidewalk where it’s someone else’s job to clean up after them. I’ve seen people go as far as to say they are graciously “providing a job” for someone else when they throw their refuse in the recycling bin.
The fact that the shopping carts are such an inconsequential thing to shrug off is what makes them a great litmus test — will you do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do, even when there is so little at stake
The great thing about the “job creation” theory of antisocial behavior is that it justifies all kinds of things, from graffiti to dumping to stealing decorative plants from the local park. Why bother following implicit (or even explicit) rules if there is no consequence? Surely it won’t have any consequences in the long run!
I confess I am a hypocrite though, as I'm one of those job-stealing people that return the cart to the corral.
I always return my cart.
The theory holds and you are making excuses for bad behaviors
It takes 30 seconds to return a cart. Nobody is so busy or has so many kids as to not be able to wheel the cart into the cart stall. If you have that many kids, then you probably can't really safely grocery shop in the first place.
The reason it gets brought up is exactly because it's a small thing to do that is generally accepted as being the right thing to do. You basically won't find someone defending not wheeling back the cart as being the right thing to do (outside of maybe a true emergency).
as the parent said, it's a 30 second walk and if you can't trust kiddo not to die for 30 seconds you shouldn't be shopping w/ them in the first place.
The workers, drivers, and potentially future shoppers.
>I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts.
You're getting the carts either way. I won't speak to if it helps to give you more time to yourself when collecting wayward carts, but there is some built in time for collections even with "good shoppers".
> if someone leaves their cart in a parking spot... well that is bad behavior
Yes, hence the shopping cart theory.
I'm not a perfect person but try to keep it out of parking those times I am tired. But I recognize that carts can still roll into the lot or that it increases risks of a future car who comes in.
No, this is simply about can people do small things to make the system better. Things that cost them essentially nothing but make the world work.
I've spent a lot of time cleaning up and observing a small strip of sidewalk in front of a retail establishment in a city and I've come to believe in a variation of the broken windows theory. If I let the sidewalk become too messy, or if I remove the trash but not the dead leaves in the fall then more trash will appear at a seemingly exponential rate. If I do a thorough job cleaning the entire area and removing all debris, however, it stays tidy for many hours, sometimes even days. I don't believe for one second that keeping the area tidy prevents people from littering there. I think the people who would drop their candy wrapper are going to do it anyway, but I think there are many people who, while walking through my tidy section of sidewalk, bend over and pick up the candy wrapper when they see it. I just think they don't bother when there's two or three candy wrappers, thus causing the observed effect.
Sometimes people do feel guilty dropping stuff, but usually only if they notice me watching them do it.
Burns off the karma from being a trouble maker on IRC (sorry Undernet). Although doing things to burn karma just generates karma for doing good things for the wrong reasons.
I did not usually see a free roaming cart though. Maybe times have changed. Usually, people would prop them up against a curb, or ditch them into a grassy spot, or they would put them by a low spot in the parking lot next to a drain, or put them next to a column on the sidewalk.
Just my anecdotal experience, it seemed like people would put their cart back if there was a cart corral in the center of every parking row.
I once calculated the number of carts Walmart has worldwide and it was mind-boggling.
I’ve noticed very few kids doing little chores like this these days. Maybe I just don’t notice it. Maybe it’s a sign of a wider rot regarding parenting. Maybe it’s nothing.
I also feel many feel (irrationally) that they are being ripped off by the store and thus won’t bother to return the cart out of spite.
> Who is really being inconvenienced?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/smugjak-but-how-does-this-aff...
You must've lived someplace with good weather. I can't imagine it being fun in a snowstorm.
I remember my brothers and I liked doing it because we'd ride on the sides of the cart while putting it away.
There is nothing wrong with citing 4chans shopping cart theory.
It is truly a marker of good vs bad people as far as it comes to participating in a high trust society.