It seems like a basic courtesy to others: you get a cart at the supermarket, use it to get your groceries and bring them to your vehicle, and return it for others to use. And yet, many people ignore the cart receptacle entirely and leave their carts next to their cars or abandoned haphazardly all over the parking lot. The Cape Charles Food Lion makes it very easy and convenient to return the cart, providing two corrals within easy walking distance from anywhere in the parking lot. Still, people just leave the cart right in the middle of a parking space.
Where does this disregard come from? More than likely, it is the same type of people that just throw trash out of their car windows, somehow unable to make it to a trash receptacle.
The essence of “shopping cart theory” proposes that an individual’s moral character can be determined by whether they choose to return a shopping cart to its designated spot after use or whether they simply leave it wherever it suits them, “The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing, the post states. To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it.”
The author of The Shopping Cart Theory continues, “No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you, or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.” The theoretician then goes on to make some rather radical statements about those who do not pass The Shopping Cart test. “A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it,” they state.
Does Food Lion need to hire a Cart Narc?
“Americans are facing an epidemic perpetuated by the laziness of their fellow citizens,” Cart Narcs, a segment on the YouTube channel The Woody Show, states in one video. “We’re talking about the dicks who don’t put their carts back into the corral.” They decided to take matters into their own hands by publically shaming people who leave their carts in the parking lot to ding cars and take up precious parking spots.
Just put the cart back where it belongs.
What a great commentary on life in America today and those who live in it.
Garl Gustav Jung missed his time!
These people didn’t exist back then, and what a field day he would have today psycho-analyzing all these various people out there today, like the ones too weak, too tired, too whatever, to put a shopping cart in a space designated for shopping carts to be placed after use.
It really isn’t hard to do, put a shopping cart in a corral for shopping carts – no special skills are involved, or at least I don’t think they are special skills.
Not like your trying to maneuver a battleship into a tight berth or anything like that.
I’m well over 70, but I still put my cart in the corral when done with it.
But of course, this is now not only a democracy, but a sacred democracy, and in a sacred democracy, everybody gets to manufacture their own laws, rules and regulations, and the result is as this article clearly demonstrates – shopping carts left all over God’s creation instead of being put back where they belong.
They need to do what ALDI does and charge a quarter for using it. You get your quarter back when you return the cart. I’ve never seen a cart in the Aldi parking lot!
May have to follow Aldi stores
You have to pay for the cart upfront then get the refund after the cart is returned
As far a trash being thrown out of vehicles
Possibly the police ( instead of only setting up speed traps) set up litter traps. I believe the fine ranges from 250.00 to 1,000
Certainly could add the much needed revenue in local towns as well as county and state .
Iv watched it work in Colorado . Fines for littering are handed out with a no tolerance policies. Don’t even try to bribe Barney Fife .
It really is a great test to see what is inside a person’s heart.
Love this post
A great Sunday chuckle
To scientifically determine where the disregard comes, whether a genetic trait of some kind, or something learned, or some kind of class thing, and we really should be following the science here, because it is the right thing to do, it would be a great sociology project to put a bunch of observers with clipboards in the Cape Charles Food Lion parking lot to come up with some vital statistics and demographics and personality traits of those who, despite the Cape Charles Food Lion making it super easy and convenient to return the cart, providing not one, but two corrals within easy walking distance from anywhere in the parking lot, ignore the cart receptacle entirely and leave their carts next to their cars or abandoned haphazardly all over the parking lot, or right in the middle of a parking space.
When an observer sees this happen, they should go up to the person and ask them for a brief biographical sketch of themselves, why it is that they feel some kind of psychological need to rebel, to buck the system, to lash out at conformity, by not returning the cart to the corral.
It would be interesting to see if they are even aware of what they are doing.
It would also be interesting to see if they voted for Joe Biden and vote the straight Democrat ticket in every election.
And what kind of cars do they drive?
Are people driving a Lexus, or Mercedes or a BMW the ones doing this?
Do they feel a class superiority or something, that it should be somebody else’s job to park their cart properly for them?
Are they the same ones doing the littering, as well?
It would indeed be an interesting profile of people in America today, alright.
Etiquette and does not exist. Refined, many are not. The local yocals.
Snitches get Stitches….
I love this post as well..I do not litter, I do not spit my gum out for someone to step in, and I most definitely ALWAYS return my shopping cart.