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Why is this shopping cart meme so prevalent all of a sudden? I’ve seen like five unique memes about it in the last few days, not just reposts but three completely unique memes
Why is this particular meme everywhere this week?
Why is this shopping cart meme so prevalent … I’ve seen like five unique memes … three completely unique memes … Why is this particular meme everywhere …
Yeah, kinda makes ya wonder just what “meme” means. ;-)
But this has been around for years, why this week am I seeing it all over the place NOW
And yeah a meme is a way of sharing information, has nothing to do with timeframe
Again american with their “blame the customer instead of pushing bussinus to hire people full time”
In America the shops have areas where you return the carts and an employee takes them from that spot back to the store. The exception to this is Aldi.
They need to do it the European way where you have to deposit a coin to get the cart and you get it back when you return it. I think Aldi does this in the US.
Should the stores have valet service patrolling the parking lot for your cart? Or should I just make sure to leave my cart parked uphill from your car?
Or maybe I should just make sure that there’s an empty cart inside every empty parking spot. That sounds like a fun sunny-day community anarchy event.
The best thing of the corrals is, when used properly, empty spots are actually empty and you don’t have to worry about stray carts slamming into your parked car. Unfortunately, they are rarely used properly.
Making work easier for the dude who has to go out to collect them is just gravy.
But there’s a segment of the American population that doesn’t want to do what’s best for ”nearly everyone, eventually”…they want to do what’s best for “me, now”. Even if most people (themselves included) doing the former automatically results in the latter. Basically prisoners dilemma. Same reason we still have Covid, same reason we can’t have public healthcare, and same reason a few kids collect lead at school every now and then.
I’m Geordi.
I’m disappointed Q isn’t on this.
Covered by the original’s post text: “Q intentionally leaves his cart in the blind spot behind the most expensive car in the lot.”
Q shops with 1 cart for each item he has, and returns them all upside down.
Q: increases the gravitational constant of the cart collection area until all the carts fall into it. Keeps going until a singularity forms and the planet is destroyed.
Q: with a bright flash Captain Picard becomes Captain Picart
Oops! Disappears with a blink
I’m Levar Burton. This is Reading Rainbow.
I’m also the guy in column 2, number 5.
Best STTNG Meme ever!!! I really enjoyed reading them all as they were so fitting to the characters. I had a few legit LOL moments here. I too am Geordi.
I believe USSBurritoTruck created this one. I was going to link the original post, but I don’t know how to make a specific post link server-agnostic.
I love that they won’t trust Wesley Crusher with the task 😄
Can you put names with all these faces? I can only do three. Updated with trash@lemm.ee 's & Klear@sh.itjust.works help, we’ve got 5 of them labeled now. Plus something about broccoli according to ashestoashes@lemmy.blahaj.zone.
Top right is Beyond Belief Fact or Fiction “we made it up” guy.
I assume this is funny answers only? Some kinda woooosh? I think a lot of Lemmy could name them all, given how popular Trek is on here.
Unfortunately I’m serious and I cannot put a name or anything else to any of those faces but of course I recognize them from the show which I’ve never really watched. Ideally the actors’ names or characters’ names. At this point it doesn’t matter, I could Google it if I really cared.
You’re allowed not to know! It’s just that since you’d got Picard I thought you’d know the rest since they’re from the same show (Star Trek: The Next Generation).
Seeing as I’ve just discovered you can use tables on Lemmy, I’ll give you a proper answer:
Actor Character Patrick Stewart Jean-Luc Picard Jonathan Frakes William Riker Brent Spiner Data Gates McFadden Beverly Crusher Marina Sirtis Deanna Troi LeVar Burton Geordi La Forge Michael Dorn Worf Denise Crosby Tasha Yar Wil Wheaton Wesley Crusher Colm Meaney Miles O’Brien Diana Muldaur Katherine Pulaski Dwight Schultz Reginald Barclay Michelle Forbes Ro Laren Majel Barrett Lwaxana Troi Brian Bonsall Alexander Rozhenko Brian Bonsall? The kid who played the youngest child Andy on Family Ties 80’s sitcom? He was on TNG? I googled him and TNG does not show up for Brian Bonsall. Is there a different Brian Bonsall in existence?
Yeah, the same kid:
the 6th on the right is lt. broccoli
okay I’ll take your word for it. I have no idea what’s going on.
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!!”
I’m not sure I agree. I think there’s some merit to leaving your cart in a different spot, where it could likely be more convenient for someone than the cart return aisle. As long as it’s secured so it doesn’t roll away, I don’t see the problem there. It’s chaotic good, at the very least.
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Come on. I think we can assume that if someone is physically incapable of putting a shopping cart back, they’re not included in this. But then I do wonder how they were using the shopping cart in the first place.
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I think the shopping cart theory needs to be a bit more fleshed out.
I had assumed it meant people leaving carts all over the parking lot, not right at the exit of the store. The problem is that carts being all over the lot often block spaces or can roll into people’s cars and damage them. If the cart is left right at the exit, those problems go away. It’s also very quick and easy for employees to grab them there. If the customer isn’t parked out in the lot, it wouldn’t make sense for them to be expected to take the cart farther away from the store just so that an employee can bring it right back.
given how often disabled people are yelled at for using disabled parking spots, I would not be as optimistic that we’d not be included
As for how they were able to use it, maybe using it for a little bit is okay but it starts physically hurting after a while leading to them not being able to put it back, that has happened to me before. Or maybe the return cart area is a bit up a hill or otherwise inaccessible
If pushing a full cart starts to hurt, then returning an empty cart should be easy.
its not that simple. pushing a full cart could start the pain at which point you’re just fucked, pushing the empty cart back might really just be too much after that
The clarifying statement I’ve seen elsewhere for this is that “…there are no impediments to returning the cart”.
I’m so in the minority here, but I have a different perspective.
I worked at a grocery store for years, with about a third of my job being cart duty. I loved it when people left their carts outside of the corrals, for a few reasons.
First, if a lot of people did so, I would point it out to whoever was the manager on at the time before I went outside. My manager knew that I would take longer before coming back in, and that would give me more time to stroll/relax/enjoy the outdoors before coming back in to customer craziness. Having those extra minutes because my manager didn’t know how long I should take was nice.
Second, sometimes I had to walk way the hell out to the edge of the parking lot, which was really nice for a long walk away from customer craziness. Such walks were very nice when the weather was nice.
Third, it was job security. Working during the recession made my managers want to let as many people go as they could, but customers who made it so even the most efficient cart duty workers took a while to clear the lot effectively kept more of us employeed than management would have employed otherwise.
For those reasons, whenever the weather is nice, I try to leave my cart in a weird spot that is anchored by something. I realize that many other cart duty folks probably dislike me for it, but I know I appreciated it when others did this. So I do it for the folks like me.
I know all of the arguments against it and I’m not trying to debate here. Just sharing a different perspective; sometimes, leaving your cart in a terrible spot can be nice for some of the workers.
whenever the weather is nice
I definitely don’t miss helping out with the carts on a freezing winter morning in Colorado and trying not to fall on my ass.
And it is those times when carts get abandoned more than ever.
Having to pull carts off of snowbanks and fracturing my arm after a fall was not my idea of a fun time when I used to work for a grocery store in high school.
Didn’t even get to leave early that day because we were short staffed and “You’re fine, you just need to keep your arm moving to work the pain off.”
One of the formative moments for me that contributed to my distrust of capitalism.
You still made the effort to put your cart in the “correct” place.
Job security for a job that shouldn’t need to exist? Dumb as shit. Do you also leave your trash wherever the fuck you want because you think it’s “job security” for whoever has to clean it up?
Why shouldn’t it exist? Are you saying people should walk carts all the way inside. That wouldn’t exactly be the better solution.
Capitalism is garbage and produce garbage jobs because it’s based in the religious concept that people should work. Within the context of capitalism, this makes sense. Putting away your cart doesn’t challenge capitalism, so “job security” makes sense as an objective unless you’re challenging the capitalist system.
Interesting point. So it’s more like
Cart? Returns Leaves Thinks return is right 😇 👿 Thinks leave is right 👿 😇 Aight, how about when it rains? Do you leave it for your own convenience? I assume putting cards away while getting drenched is not fun at all. This is the real litmus test. You will be judged.
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.
Mostly, people take the left carts back into the store to shop with
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?
Nah lol I return the shopping cart and don’t make a mess in public. But I really don’t believe that’s some kinda evidence of morality.
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 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.
Then you sure are a bad member of society. Did you read the post?
I think the theory goes too far, tbh. If we’re being a little bit realistic, a difference between animals and members of human society is that animals cannot and do not obey laws. Higher order animals obey direct threats of punishment, such as if you’ve trained them not to shit on the floor, but that’s not the same as law. With a law, you are aware of the consequences without having directly experienced them.
An animal only respects consequences after directly experiencing them.
I am willing to accept into society those who obey (just) laws without directly experiencing the consequences. They ARE better than animals, they are not savages, they are not bad members of society. They are doing the bare minimum necessary to belong to society; indeed, their existence is the reason we form societies at all. You might not want to be friends with them but they aren’t animals.
While the conclusion of this post goes to far, I do think it nails it right in the first sentence: if you return the cart, if you do what is correct without need for a law, then you are capable of being self-governing. You would make a good anarchist, for example, because your social group would function well without laws.
If there was a law punishing people for not putting shopping carts back, I would deliberately break it and sue whatever stupid fucking government passed such a thing under the grounds listed in the post.
A law like that would be a violation of our rights. You can’t just use government to force people to do whatever you want. We have rights.
Pretty sure it could be considered fly tipping.
Same logic can apply to throwing your trash around. Which does get fined.
I am pretty surprised no one has sued to get those laws overturned on those grounds.
Laws like that are just dog whistles to enable discrimination, just as loitering laws are.
A law like that would be a violation of our rights
We have a right to not clean up after ourselves? Tell me more
The fact is you’re borrowing a cart from it’s owner, probably a store. If the store requires you to put it back and you don’t the they would be within their rights to sue you over it. The only reason they don’t is because their damages would be massively less valuable than their legal fees and the time it would take to present a lawsuit.
You really do. Governments can’t arbitrarily make you do whatever they want through laws; they have to have good reasons for it that are acceptable by the people, and no one thinks it’s acceptable for governments to harm their own citizens over an act the OP emphatically tells us harms no one.
An act that really doesn’t mean anything more than a minor inconvenience and annoyance for everyone else.
And you want to harm people over it.
They’re not the ones who are disgusting. You are.
Imagine if you were able to lay down an argument without a strawman and ad hominem fallacy.
Rokos shopping cart
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.
Why the downvotes?
Fun fact: Blåhaj Lemmy doesn’t federate downvotes, which means all the downvotes you’re seeing are from your instance. And I feel like the people on your instance are very trigger-happy with the dowvote button for anything that is slightly out of line with the overall narrative.
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.
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 the cart runner 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
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.
Yeah bringing in the carts is one of the best parts of some jobs
When I was a cart pusher I could spend all day in the lot. What really sucked is when they changed from the lightweight plastic basket carts to the XL metal carts. Could push plastic basket carts all day and I would smoke cigarettes by my car in the downtime. XL metal carts ruined that job. Also never cared if they were corralled. You have to push them out the corral and with the XL metal carts they were heavy and hard to maneuver.
