cobright
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2013
For those who don't know, Cart Narcs is a 'bit' video series done by a 'popular' radio show call (I think) 'The Woody Show'.
The premise is they wait in parking lots for people to not return their cart to a provided cart corral and then run up on those people to confront them over it. A climax of each bit is the Narc putting a magnetic bumper sticker on the person's identifying them as a horrible person. In several cases, as the shopper is attempting to simply ignore the guy and drive off, the Narc will push the persons cart behind their car so they have to stop and get back out or (in cases where they don't see it happen) they hit it.
I have to admit I was a bit shocked, and it seems to be a generational divide. The vast majority of people polled on this support the CartNarcs.
The most common opinion is that only horrible people (and some handicapped) would even think to not return a cart to the provided corral. I take my cart to the corral 95% of the time. When I don't, it's because there isn't a corral close enough. I've always seen this as a courtesy, something I'm doing to help the store out a bit if I have the time. I kind of find the idea that there is a social requirement to do this a bit offensive.
The funny thing is that the pro-Narc position seems to have an "of course you're supposed to put them in the corral" mentality as if this is something that's been true forever.
I think this may be true for European countries, my Brit friend was shocked when he saw store employees bagging his groceries. But cart corrals for the middle of parking lots were invented in 1991, and did not get used much at all until the mid 90s. I'm 45 years old, until sometime in my 20s the norm was to unload your cart and place it at the head of your parking spot. This was the way shopping worked since the late '30s when shopping carts were invented.
Which is another aspect of the attitude I see... that it's the least I can do in exchange for the use of the cart ... which is just silly. Those carts are not there as a favor to us. They were invented because if we only had hand baskets we would buy much much less stuff. The price of my groceries includes the use of a cart and someone to come collect them from the parking lot every couple of hours. Some stores, like Aldi, use a coin deposit system on the carts and they also don't bag or provide bags, and their prices are much much cheaper for most things.
Another common argument is that corralling ones cart is the least one can do to help out the low-paid worker. But we're talking about hourly workers. Every job a grocery bagger or stocker can be put to doing is going to be more demanding than wrangling carts. At 14 I was a bagger and the highlight of my shift was collecting carts or sometimes taking bottle returns (back then a store employee took your cans and counted and sorted them for you).
I see the shopping cart return, much like the can deposit machines, as another case of the stores giving us less while charging us the same. Or the self checkout aisles, a method to get the same amount of customers through while hiring fewer and fewer people. Because all that time you save the store by corralling your carts doesn't make it so the low paid worker has less to do, it just makes it so there are less of them.
The premise is they wait in parking lots for people to not return their cart to a provided cart corral and then run up on those people to confront them over it. A climax of each bit is the Narc putting a magnetic bumper sticker on the person's identifying them as a horrible person. In several cases, as the shopper is attempting to simply ignore the guy and drive off, the Narc will push the persons cart behind their car so they have to stop and get back out or (in cases where they don't see it happen) they hit it.
I have to admit I was a bit shocked, and it seems to be a generational divide. The vast majority of people polled on this support the CartNarcs.
The most common opinion is that only horrible people (and some handicapped) would even think to not return a cart to the provided corral. I take my cart to the corral 95% of the time. When I don't, it's because there isn't a corral close enough. I've always seen this as a courtesy, something I'm doing to help the store out a bit if I have the time. I kind of find the idea that there is a social requirement to do this a bit offensive.
The funny thing is that the pro-Narc position seems to have an "of course you're supposed to put them in the corral" mentality as if this is something that's been true forever.
I think this may be true for European countries, my Brit friend was shocked when he saw store employees bagging his groceries. But cart corrals for the middle of parking lots were invented in 1991, and did not get used much at all until the mid 90s. I'm 45 years old, until sometime in my 20s the norm was to unload your cart and place it at the head of your parking spot. This was the way shopping worked since the late '30s when shopping carts were invented.
Which is another aspect of the attitude I see... that it's the least I can do in exchange for the use of the cart ... which is just silly. Those carts are not there as a favor to us. They were invented because if we only had hand baskets we would buy much much less stuff. The price of my groceries includes the use of a cart and someone to come collect them from the parking lot every couple of hours. Some stores, like Aldi, use a coin deposit system on the carts and they also don't bag or provide bags, and their prices are much much cheaper for most things.
Another common argument is that corralling ones cart is the least one can do to help out the low-paid worker. But we're talking about hourly workers. Every job a grocery bagger or stocker can be put to doing is going to be more demanding than wrangling carts. At 14 I was a bagger and the highlight of my shift was collecting carts or sometimes taking bottle returns (back then a store employee took your cans and counted and sorted them for you).
I see the shopping cart return, much like the can deposit machines, as another case of the stores giving us less while charging us the same. Or the self checkout aisles, a method to get the same amount of customers through while hiring fewer and fewer people. Because all that time you save the store by corralling your carts doesn't make it so the low paid worker has less to do, it just makes it so there are less of them.
