Forty five years ago, ONE supermarket here had an arrangement where, after you paid for your groceries and rolled your cart to the inside front of the store, and drove up to the outside, employees put your bags on a conveyor belt and sent them outside. My parents never shopped there. Too expensive - and this is, and was, an average suburban community with oretty average incomes.
Stores - all stores, with and without carts, grocery and not - have raised prices. There's inflation, there's the cost of transporting goods (which should have gone down, but hasn't), there's the cost of transporting the goods to make the goods... increased pay via minimum wage laws (and, sure, merit pay, annual COL increases...); there are higher property taxes, higher rents... those higher grocery prices have to cover a LOT, and still remain competitive enough to draw customers.
No store I know tells customers to check out their own purchases, although many do have a few registers that allow customers to do this - vast difference. Bag it yourself? At the self-check counters, yeah; at the cashier-operated registers - never, except by my choice (in, granted, my experience - I tend not to stick around and bag other customers' items).
Bring it to the car yourself? Again, I've never known a store that provided employees to transport customers' carts/purchases to the vehicles on a regular basis, in many, many years of shopping. Some will offer under certain circumstances, and most will comply if asked.
So, really, in forty-five years, the only thing that's changed in my experience is that many stores now provide relatively convenient cart drop-off areas, hoping that customers will stop leaving carts at random throughout the lot.
SO much emphasis is placed on do-it-yourself - heck, there's an entire television network dedicated to that POF - why is returning a shopping cart to a safe area so controversial?
to the first part of your post. But I do think there are good excuses occasionally.
