Cart Narcs ... I mean, I get it, but when did this become a thing?

[LSUmiss]

In terms of price tag "that kinda damage" is a bit irrelevant. Small dings can still cost a pretty penny. As for terrain I mean yes and no. I've not seen a parking lot in my area with hills galore and yet an every so slightly tiny slope in a certain portion of a parking lot can cause a cart to move. Windy day can do that too. Will that mean carts are going all banging into people's cars? No, but terrain is not the be it all to that.
I do think is what has been driving the conversation.

I do think though respectfully it just comes off like you are trying to justify how your area handles it by bringing to the table random other examples. Certainly it's quite nice that your husband opens the door at WDW but it's not as if to other people who return carts to the corral that it someone absolves that behavior of not returning the carts by exhibiting some other behavior seen as polite. I do know that may sound rude and I apologize in advance if it comes off that way

However, I remember from a past discussion that in your area it is just a thing that it's NBD in not returning the carts so I do think you are just describing how it is in your area just like others are for their areas. It doesn't sound like you would think someone was crazy to return a cart other than maybe assume they are more from outside the area so that, to me at least, counts for something

Yeah that’s my only point about the door, that areas are different. And unless the corral is literally right next to your parking spot, it would be odd for me to see someone walking to put the cart up. I’ve actually been paying more attention since reading this thread, and it’s just not a thing. No one cares or does it.

 

[kaytieeldr]

I was at a not-very-busy (nobody counting customers, not a lot of cars in the lot compared to the cheaper supermarket) store this morning. They have cart corrals. Interestingly, I notced several more or less clusters of carts...but not in the same parking space.

Oh, yeah, the largest cluster I saw were four empty parking spaces away from the cart corral in the same aisle. Now, they didn't sit there extremely long, as this store employs cart collectors. Other employ also collect carts as needed (i.e. no job loss), but I was sitting there for an hour waiting for my ride,and nobody in parked in that area corralled a cart.

Weather is great, maybe a little humid but in the 70s. No wind, no rain, no kids in thevstore or parking lot at all. OOps, I take that back. Around 9 AM, a woman entered with her ;i'm guessing) 8-10 year old daughter. But they hadn't parked anywhere near that section

 

[cobright]

The stores already have people going out to get the carts out of the corral. Are you trying to justify leaving the carts randomly in the parking lot help keep someone employed?

The stores already have people paid to recover carts from the parking lot. Up until 20 years ago this meant that most carts were recovered from the front of the parking spaces between where the parked cars were. There was usually a curb or bumper there to keep carts from getting out of hand. Retrieving the carts taken to cars by customers was a service the store included with the price of your groceries. Just like occasionally knocking a jar off the shelf, leaving one's cart at ones parking space was the norm, just as an attendant taking your returnable cans and counting them for you was the norm, the cashier ringing up the order was the norm, a bagger bagging the groceries was the norm.

What I'm saying is that turning the issue into whether it is rude to not always walk the cart to a corral is a distraction. The question is only possible because the stores have gotten us to do the work that they used to charge us for and pay others to do. In a grocery store it was most common for each operating checkout lane to have its own bagger. Fewer during very light times but that was the setup. The major supermarket near me doesn't even employ baggers anymore. The cashier gets the extra work of bagging and the customer gets the extra work of loading the bags into the cart off of the carousel. These baggers are the workers who would be called on to count and sort a customers returnable cans, and retrieve carts. Jobs more or less eliminated and handed over to the customer to do. Which would be fine, it's not an onerous burden by any means. But call it what it is. They're asking more from their customers so they can hire fewer employees.

A store like Aldi has that as part of its business model and it works and I shop there often. they cut out all the services I can do myself and then they drop prices to reflect that. Walmart, Meijer, Kroger, ... they all expect largely the same level of 'audience participation' and their prices (adjusted for inflation) have not diminished.

Then the people employed to do that can be moved to other areas.

Businesses always try to run at equilibrium. If they need 10 people to cover the work on a shift, then you hire enough people to let you schedule 10 for each shift. If you are able to convince enough customers to do enough of that work themselves that now they only need 9 people to cover the work on each shift the "people employed to do" will be, "moved to" unemployment.

Leaving the issue of cart corrals aside for a moment, this is self-evident. My Walmart has 30+ checkout lanes but there's rarely more than 3 or 4 open regardless of how bad the lines get. At times, if you don't accept the self-checkout lane you don't get checked out at all.

Businesses are giving us less service for the same prices, No different than shrinking the standard package of ice cream by 25% while only dropping the price by 5% (and then quickly raising the price back to the original then even higher levels (even adjusted for inflation).

And your rates go up how much after that claim?

A comprehensive claim rarely has much effect on your premiums. Sometimes you might lose a zero-claim discount by putting it through, but since comprehensive claims are not tied to driver risk, they're for things that outside the driver's (any driver's) control, there's no change in basis for your premium.

I pay about $180 a year for the comprehensive insurance on my car. A few years back a tree brought an electrical wire down and that wire set my car on fire... thoroughly. I carried the bare minimum insurance needed to drive it and a comprehensive policy and ... after a $500 deductible and a lengthy investigation, they cut a check for the remaining $12k ish of appraised value.

 

[VandVsmama]

I just wanted to report that early this morning I went to the grocery store and am proud to announce that at least for today, I am not a selfish, horrible animal because I put my grocery cart in its designated corral.


<-- I think that I deserve a gold star for that, so I went ahead and awarded myself one.

 

[kaytieeldr]

@VandVsmama, I couldn't give you a star, it's not one of the "!ike" emojis, so you got the next best thing

 

[kaytieeldr]

What I'm saying is that turning the issue into whether it is rude to not always walk the cart to a corral is a distraction.

It's rude to always not (iow, never) walk the cart back. Not always walking it back is more excusable.

Of the three supermarkets I've shopped recently,
Three have Cart Collectors (Courtesy Clerks)
Two have baggers all the time
Three have cart corrals
One has no baggers, ever
The store with no baggers is the worst at collecting carts
Three stores empower Front End employees, except cashiers (who genuinely can't leave the registers) to assist customers getting their purchases to their cars.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

What I'm saying is that turning the issue into whether it is rude to not always walk the cart to a corral is a distraction. The question is only possible because the stores have gotten us to do the work that they used to charge us for and pay others to do. In a grocery store it was most common for each operating checkout lane to have its own bagger.

You sound a lot like my mom when approached by the very idea of doing self-check out "I don't get paid to do that"...

You've propositioned this all as a "evil store, making me do work the peons can do themselves" kind of mantra. I mean it's certainly within your right to have that viewpoint. Majority of folks tend to just think of it as a courtesy that may or may not be the norm in one's area so it's telling that you have the viewpoint you seem to be conveying.

 

[sam_gordon]

What I'm saying is that turning the issue into whether it is rude to not always walk the cart to a corral is a distraction. The question is only possible because the stores have gotten us to do the work that they used to charge us for and pay others to do. In a grocery store it was most common for each operating checkout lane to have its own bagger. Fewer during very light times but that was the setup. The major supermarket near me doesn't even employ baggers anymore. The cashier gets the extra work of bagging and the customer gets the extra work of loading the bags into the cart off of the carousel. These baggers are the workers who would be called on to count and sort a customers returnable cans, and retrieve carts. Jobs more or less eliminated and handed over to the customer to do. Which would be fine, it's not an onerous burden by any means. But call it what it is. They're asking more from their customers so they can hire fewer employees.

A store like Aldi has that as part of its business model and it works and I shop there often. they cut out all the services I can do myself and then they drop prices to reflect that. Walmart, Meijer, Kroger, ... they all expect largely the same level of 'audience participation' and their prices (adjusted for inflation) have not diminished.

Or the prices haven't gone up as much as they would if they kept the extra workers?

 

[Heather07438]

I would guess that the people who regularly leave their carts astray and litter are also those who leave 20 items on the floor inside the dressing room. Maturity might also play a part. I think as we get older we start to see these actions differently.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

I would guess that the people who regularly leave their carts astray and litter are also those who leave 20 items on the floor inside the dressing room. Maturity might also play a part. I think as we get older we start to see these actions differently.

Nah plenty of young people out there who think quite differently. As for the dressing room...you wouldn't believe the people who do terrible things in them of all sorts of ages. It's not an "as you get older thing" because there are plenty of older people who don't view some of these things as the polite thing to do but rather "it's someone else's job not mine". I think it's just a personality thing (and not meant in a mean way).

 

[DisLiss]

I'm firmly on the "two 'wrongs' don't make a 'right'" bench on this one. I do think it's wrong to leave a cart loose in a parking lot if you are capable of/able to return it. But I think it's also wrong to harass strangers over a non-secured cart.

A.) Runaway carts hit cars. It happens frequently. Sometimes it's as minor as scratched paint. Other times it can be more--like a smashed light. I've had both types of damage happen to my car.

B.) In some situations it can be even more dangerous, because loose carts can actually make their way out unto streets. We have a local store that's up on a hill and the carts gain enormous speed leaving the parking lot, and they cannot be seen by people in the road. Every so often when you're there you hear the "Smash!" of one of the carts hitting the guardrail on the other side of the street, and I am always relieved when I realize that the cart made it across the road without hitting a car, bike, or pedestrian.

C.) No one like finding a spot and starting to pull on, only to see there's a cart in the middle of it. Many times it's not much of a big deal to hop out of the car quickly and move the car until you finish parking, but in plenty of other cases it does cause more of an inconvenience.

I get that for some folks it's not easy to walk any more than they need to, and that other factors may make it especially hard for you in certain situations----a problem with someone who is with you, needing to leave quickly because you've just received a call about something you need to attend to immediately, etc., which is why I specifically feel one should return it if they are able.

That being said, I firmly believe that many folks (in my area, anyway) leave them loose just because they don't feel like returning them, and I make that deduction based on stores like Aldi, where the addition of one quarter magically keeps the parking lot free of loose carts. If I shop at 3 or 4 stores, all within a tenth of a mile of one another, and every lot but Aldi's has loose carts, that leads me to believe that people are deciding a quarter is worth returning their cart, but being courteous to others is not worth returning their cart. And at Aldi, you have to bring the cart back to the building. So it's a bigger pain than the store lots with a dozen corrals all about them. I do no believe that by some strange miracle the customers at Aldi are all magically more capable of returning their carts. I've seen some people who looked like they could barely keep themselves up still taking their cart back at Aldi.

Anyway, despite that oration on my feelings about cart returning I think harassing people and slapping things onto their cars is not only rude and unnecessary, but stupid and dangerous as well. It takes just the wrong person being confronted to wind up with people in prison or someone injured or worse. I have no way of knowing why any given person doesn't return their cart and neither does anyone else. But even if we could be assured that the person stood there and thought "I'd like to tick people off and damage cars, so I'm leaving this right here! Hahahaha!!!" I still don't think anyone has the right to do anything to the cart abandoning shopper. There's a much easier method of fixing the problem of a loose cart---take it back yourself. I do it all the time, and I'm fat with asthma and a bad knee.

 

[Skippy918]

I always return my cart to the corral. If I don’t have a lot of bags, I will leave the cart at the front of the store where all the other carts and carry the bags.

Growing up in nyc, I guess too many people stole the carts because you weren’t allowed to bring them to your car to load the groceries. The pillars were there and the carts didn’t fit thru them. So you had to carry everything with you or your parent made you wait with the cart while they brought the car around.

 

[kaytieeldr]

Businesses are giving us less service for the same prices, No different than shrinking the standard package of ice cream by 25% while only dropping the price by 5% (and then quickly raising the price back to the original then even higher levels (even adjusted for inflation).

Businesses here being manufacturers. Not the stores. Stores have little to no control over manufacturers.

If I shop at 3 or 4 stores, all within a tenth of a mile of one another, and every lot but Aldi's has loose carts, that leads me to believe that people are deciding a quarter is worth returning their cart, but being courteous to others is not worth returning their cart.

Nah. Aldi just has their customers "conditioned".

Growing up in nyc, I guess too many people stole the carts because you weren’t allowed to bring them to your car to load the groceries

Either Best Buy or Target here has their carts programmed to not be able to leave the lot - either "naturally", or with human assistance.

 

[DisLiss]

Nah. Aldi just has their customers "conditioned".

They pulled their customers from the same pool of people who shopped/shop at the other stores, though and those customers became conditioned almost immediately, because I have marveled at the miraculous nature of that quarter since Aldi first came to our area.

 

[anotherfakename]

I do it if I can. Sometimes I have a bunch of infants and toddlers with me (I am a foster parent). If I have young kids with me, the cart isn't as much of a priority. And I wouldn't really give a crap who ran up on me and tried to "shame" me.

People need to get a hobby.

 

[Poohlove]

That is why I always park next to the cart corrals, sure way to not get a dent

 

[robinb]

I found this really insightful until the last two paragraphs. It just goes a little too far.

well, it is 4Chan after all.

 

[Nox]

If this is your situation why not park near the cart return? They're generally further out in the lots so it's not hard to get a spot near them.

Not true where I live. The cart returns are either at the front of the store, or in the first six spots in several lanes.

 

[Nox]

Since curse words are censored here, I will say this kind of behavior rhymes with "ick wad."

Funny that people are saying "if you don't return the cart, you're self-absorbed and think the world revolves around you." That is somehow not true of people who think they are the social police?

Who elected you to police others? No one. You're just a jerk with a holier-than-thou complex and too much time on their hands. Take the time you're using confronting people in parking lots over grocery carts and go learn how to do something useful. Use that energy to solve an actual problem in the world.

And goodness, "waaaaaah people don't return their carts to the cart return!" is the definition of a first-world problem.

I always return my cart, but I despise obnoxious people even when I am not their target.

 

[jlmarr]

Today at Home Depot I watched some Bozo leave his cart behind the car next to him. Not in the corral, not in the planter, not between parking spots, but behind someone else's car so they'll need to deal with it.