If you scatter carts in random places the supermarket has to employ someone to collect them. So you are a job creatorTM. This is why I never return my cart, and also why I jump on cartons of milk in the dairy aisle and take a dump in the broccoli.
People who actually think this are using it as an excuse for their bad manners.
The person employed by the supermarket to gather carts is not employed to return your cart to the cart return near your vehicle. They are employed to gather the carts from the cart return near your vehicle and bring them back to the store building’s cart return.
By doing this, you do not create more jobs (as the cart return employee position already exists whether you return your cart or not), you create more work for an already probably underpaid employee and you also increase everyone’s autoinsurance because when the wind blows the carts damage other people’s vehicles.
I definitely have the unpopular opinion of disagreeing. As much as I’d like to employ manners with my grocery store, if there’s no corral within a 30 second walk from me, I don’t put the cart back. Most of my purchases are under 8 items and I usually don’t use a cart so I just carry everything by hand in the store and out.
My grocery store doesn’t care about manners on their end. It treats me like an economic unit and even makes self checkout the most reasonable option. They’d have me clean the floors as part of the checkout if they could. From a utilitarian perspective, it makes more sense for one person to gather all the carts in a batch rather than each individual going back for their individual cart.
The insurance rates thing is a legitimate point ( insurance is a racket, though. Fuck those guys too)
“They don’t have good manners, so I won’t have good manners” is a terrible way of thinking and living. If everyone did this, it would only take one person to completely eradicate good manners from humanity forever.
Yeah I see your point and I’ve got amazing manners with human beings. It’s a view I personally reserve for companies. And the larger they are, the less I respect them enough to have ‘manners’ towards them.
Perhaps it’s the inability for people to treat corporations the way corporations treat people that leads to such a power differential.
Don’t be a lazybones folks!
Another possibility is that people that don’t return the cart may not be having their needs met. A person who is tired after walking across the hot parking lot may not return it out of a desire to maintain a modicum of health. Or, perhaps, they may not think about it because their cognition is temporarily hindered by hunger, exhaustion, or some other carnal need.
On Maslow’s hierarchy, I’d say if a person meets all of their physiological and safety needs they are more likely to return the cart than those who do not.
If they’re so tired after walking around the shop and walking back to their car that they can’t do that tiny bit more and return the cart to the corral, maybe they should be seeing a doctor to see if they are eligible for disability (sounds like a severe case of lazybonesitis) and use a handicapped spot. Or you know, stop being so fucking lazy and making excuses.
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
I straighten them because they annoy me lol.
