Stop giving away free labour to large grocery stores! They want to merge and jack up prices and somehow we are bad if we don’t bring the carts in so they don’t need to hire someone to do it?
This had to be a bad joke. Only a low level trash scum of our society could write something like that unironicly.
No one said to bring it in. They have corrals in the parking lot where you put them.
Work in a grocery store for a month and tell us again how we should all be jerks in a way that will never impact their corporate bottom line but will absolutely make the workers’ lives harder.
I worked at a grocery store before and bringing in the carts is the best part of the job lol
I’ve always told my family I like to build up “cart karma.” You get karma by bringing a cart in with you from the parking lot, or returning the one you use after. You lose karma by leaving your cart in the parking lot. Even if I’m going in for a single item, I’ll take a cart in from the parking lot with me and leave it in the rack by the store.
I don’t really care about cart karma, it’s just a way of saying that it seems like the nice thing to do.
st peter at the pearly gates: “yup, looks like you’re up 14 carts overall. welcome to heaven.”
All sins and virtues get converted to cart return equivalent.
“14 carts positive, plus those 4 times you helped old ladies cross the street adds 12 more carts, minus 8 carts for the time you tried to help one but ended up punching her instead (it would have been 10 but it’s reduced by 2 because Dionysus was watching that one and said even he would have had trouble holding his temper and he’s a pretty chill dude). You’re up 18 carts overall, congrats!”
“update, your next of kin bought 2 model golden shopping carts from the temple and put them by your gravestone, getting you to a nice round 20. here’s your all-access pass to the Garden of Delights”
I do this by necessity because the medium-sized carts are most popular and they’re usually only available in the parking lot anyway.
Plot twist: I don’t use a shopping cart. (I always use the textile shopping bag that I bring from home.)
That’s considered a security concern in most grocery stores where I live. There are signs telling you not to place any items in your shopping bags until you’ve paid for them. You must use a cart or waste several minutes hunting around the entrance or registers trying to find where they hid one of their 10 shopping baskets.
I like shoplifting laws in the common law system because they’re, like all theft laws, based on intent. They need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you intended to take and deprive them of whatever they’re accusing you of stealing. If someone conceals something in an elaborate or strange way, you can nail them without them leaving the store. If they put it in their hoodie pocket or shopping bag and have a good excuse for doing so (this is all I had, I wanted to carry more), to “hold” it however, and “forgot” to scan it, you need to actually show that it’s a pattern of several times if you want any hope of actually prosecuting them. At least with this policy I guess the stores can ban you even if they can’t legally do anything against you. Don’t take this comment as encouraging the policy though, you can steal whatever you like from corporations as far as I’m concerned.
Wow, what kind of dystopia do you live in? In my town, they’re just happy you went to their store, and I presume cracking down on what little shoplifting there is would drive away more business than it saves.
I have never seen that even in shitty areas.
Admittedly, in the upper class neighborhood grocery stores I don’t see those signs. The areas I see them aren’t shitty though they are fairly high traffic compared to what I assume would be a typical store.
I looked for but couldn’t find a photo of such a sign on DDG. I’ll take a picture of one next time I need to get groceries.
New Jersey, as I said in another reply it’s not a bad area but they have high traffic. I haven’t seen the signs in the upper class neighborhoods grocery stores though.
Ew, I guess that’s another reason to never live in NJ…
In the UK you have to put a £1 coin in to unlock it. Whenever you return the trolley back, it gives you the coin back
That goes for everything you can return but don’t have to. You can throw your trash away after the movie, you don’t have to leave it in the theatre.
Germany are good at this. Not great, mind you, but good.
I wonder what Japanese movie theatre’s are like
Not all return situations are equal either. There is a difficulty factor. I’ve returned carts every time in my life except once. I was about 50 car rows deep in a massive crowded lot and I realized there were no cart corrals at all. At the back of the massive lot and much, much closer to me was a bunch of carts. I pushed a few together and added mine. The difference in this scenario was not me.
See this is an exception that proves the rule. The fact that there was no way for you to return the cart to a cart corral means that it was a noticeable and memorable event, a deviation from what should normally be the correct way of doing things. If you had been a person who’d never returned carts, this would have just been a day ending with the letter “y.”
You return your cart because it’s the right thing to do
I return my cart because it gives me a sense of superiority
We are not the same
You return your cart because it’s the right thing to do
I return my cart to get my euro back that I put in to unlock it
Mr fancy pants here with full euro coins.
I treasure my red plastic €0.50 coin replica more than my life.
You guys can use €0.50 coins?! Over here in Australia it’s either a $1 or $2 coin. I wish I could chuck a 50¢ piece in the trolley.
50 eurocent coins are actually about the same size as 1 and 2 euro coins, so that’s why
Why not just 3D print a few more?
Why 3d print them when the same supermarket gives them out for free?
Wait, they do? Why would they do that?
Eh, 'cause otherwise people will have to exchange money for coins, sometimes people don’t have notes to exchange, etc… Seems like retaining the token is incentive enough to return the cart…
Why not just ask for another one?
I put in a 2€ and look down on other shoppers
You guys still do that?
I straighten them because they annoy me lol.
what I don’t get is when there’s multiple rows of carts, people often put their cart in the row that is already the longest, instead of putting it in the shortest one to balance it out
Sheep mentality, another way in which the shopping cart is the mirror of our society
I knew I wasn’t the only one.
I’ll also go fetch a couple on the way if I see some hanging out. It’s not because I’m trying to make the cart wrangler’s job easier, but because it’s not orderly and it bothers me. I have to consciously limit myself or I’d end up patrolling the whole lot.
Yay, I’m good!
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Around here there are definitely consequences in the form of pesky looks and headshakes. Well at least coming from me.
I’ve even helped by putting my nose in the air and saying, “that’s ok, I’ll put it away for you”
Costco is the only place I don’t always return carts, since around here the cart returns can get very far away, but curbs you can tuck them away on are everywhere. That, and they have staff just for gathering carts constantly.
Curbing carts bends the wheels. If you’ve even been annoyed by a cart with a bad wheel, congratulations you played yourself.
I agree that people should put the carts where they go, but this whole “I’m a better human because I put carts back” thing just reeks of unredeemable people scouring their existence for a single redeeming property.
We have now this in Migros and Coop:
Place it in the stack at the checkout where you unload it and go. Kinda breaks that test. And a headache less for the clerks.
Wrong. The correct act is to put the cart out of the way of others, but not in the corral.
You then help provide a job to a person that capitalism wants to take away. They want your free labor. And then they provide less and less corals to save those extra pennies, knowing that you’ll walk. Fuck them.
Don’t know about you people, but here in Hungary (Eastern-Europe) I haven’t ever seen a cart not returned at least as far as I remember.
i once visited Lewiston, Maine and none of the carts had been returned to the proper spot. more than a dozen carts were just scattered around the parking lot. as soon as i found somewhere to park, i got out and collected every cart in the lot. the boy i was dating at the time looked at me with concern in his eyes
A lot of countries use coin operated cart releases, which give you a coin back on return. This is very uncommon in the US. Generally there are just metal “corrals” with guardrails you return a cart to in the parking lot.
The only store that I know of that uses coin returns is Aldi, but that’s still regional in the US.
Yeah, every store has those here. Also Aldi is nationwide.
Yeah, both are uncommon here. Aldi is regional in the US. Trader Joe’s is generally in the other regions, which is owned by the Aldi nord part of the family.
I don’t think the lack of overlap is that intentional, it’s just a big nation and Aldi/trader joes just haven’t really tried to expand in the areas where the other setup first.
And a German company no less.
Now I’ll upset some people here, I’m sure but…
Here in the UK, you can see how decent an area is using this method.
Go to the nearest Tesco Extra. If they have the coin traps on the trolleys, probably a dodgy area. If they don’t, not so dodgy area.
In both cases, you’re going to find the trolleys are generally not left lying around. Read into it what you will.
I only use Tesco extra as an example because from my experience other supermarkets either have the coin traps, or don’t. It seems only Tesco (correct me if I’m wrong) vary the behaviour by area.
Do some houses in areas that are struggling have barred windows? Are grocery stores likely to put laundry detergent and liquor behind plexiglass?
UK here, no coins in any shop’s trolleys.
I’m outraged at the number of people leaving carts everywhere. Do they have other people wiping their butt for them too? I don’t understand.This is accurate is my city with no coin traps. Nicer areas have no carts laying around. “Lower class” areas have lots of carts around.
Funny thing is in the high class area I never see an employee doing cart return, but in the lower class area they’ll be 2 or 3 doing it.
So it’s not a matter of staffing. It’s the people not having good cart etiquette.
BUT! What if the parking lot is four miles long and there are no cart returns anywhere and you’re tired because you’ve been working 20 hour days with no time off and it’s 140 degrees outside and the grocery store is exploiting their workers and you haven’t eaten in days and you have a disability and the carts are coin operated and this is literally the only way to solve the unemployment crisis? WHAT THEN??
