European here. I absolutely do NOT understand what everyone here is discussing. When I take the cart at mall, I just simply return it. What’s the biggie? Since I take it from the place closest to my car, I usually return it to the same one where I picked it up. To be honest it never ever even crossed my mind to leave it on the parking spot. Are you, the ones who do this, animals or what?
It’s a very visible thing when people do it. It’s not common where I’m from, but if 1,000 other people go to a store, then just one person leaving a cart in an awkward place pisses off 999 others.
It doesn’t take much to make it seem like a lot of people are being inconsiderate, when it’s much more likely that a small minority of people have a very wide reaching emotional impact.
It is uncommon for US grocery stores and supermarkets to leave carts scattered around the parking lot in corrals on purpose. Typically there’s an employee who frequently retrieves all the carts and puts them in a huge covered stall just by the building entrance, so the corrals are often empty. Hell, some stores don’t have corrals at all.
i wonder what the association is between the size of a parking lot and the frequency of its stores buggies not being returned by shoppers. from the pictures of beautiful european cities and towns i’ve seen, walkability seems to be an important development concern. i’m sure not everywhere, but by contrast, many shopping areas in the us are concrete wastelands with stores wrapping around massive, massive parking lots. perhaps parking 1/4 mile away from the store you just left makes it easier for people to excuse themselves from doing the right thing. i guess we don’t have a great track record with doing the right thing in any context though.
walkability seems to be an important development concern
While true for more modern development, many beautiful, walkable European cities were simply built before cars were around, so it’s not like they made an extra effort to make them walkable, that’s just how things were done
thanks for the insight, which makes sense. stupid cars.
I mean cars do a lot of good, but yeah. The thing that messed up the US was a policy introduced in some places making a ridiculously high minimum number of parking spaces required for any business. And now, it’s pretty tough to overcome the way that made cities take shape, since now you kind of need to take a car to get places reasonably, meaning places need parking spots to make their customers feel like they can get in… It’s a viscous cycle
100%. it seems to me that the broad scaling of community played a critical factor, being born out of the privilege of personal vehicle transportation. now we live in one place, work in another, play in another, eat in another, etc. in some cases sure, maybe that could theoretically give you 3+ different circles of orbit and thus 3 different communities of fellowship and support. from experience though it looks more like an incongruent/lacking distribution of the kind of important ties between others that would otherwise develop organically within in a given community. ultimately it seems to reinforce our isolation and undermines a sense of belonging.
If they have the corral I put it in the corral. If not I will bring it back to the store or try to avoid taking it to my car in the first place so I can leave it at the store and not come back.
The key is to return the cart to a designated location where the store is asking that they be returned.
pick one. it doesnt matter as long as you do it.
people push those carts all aroound the damn store but that last 25-100 feet is just a bridge too far. door or corral.
Why have a corral if that’s not good enough? Of course the corral is fine, provided you actually put it in and not just in the general vicinity.
They mean the corral. That’s why the stores have the corrals spread out in the parking lot and hire people whose job is partly to bring the carts in.
As an introvert, doing a “cart run” was my temporary reprieve from the horrors of retail.
I had that job in high school. When I first started, someone who’d been doing it for years was showing me the ropes, and he pointed out that sometimes people who live nearby the store would just walk to the store, then walk home with the cart, and leave it at the apartment complex, so he would (and thereby I should) periodically walk down there to collect them.
I initially thought this was complete BS and I hated that I was being asked to do it. After the first week or so, I realized what was actually up: He was inviting me to take paid breaks every hour or two, during which I got to take a leisurely 20 minute walk down the street and back, and not have to deal with customers or managers or anyone else, and he’d managed to sell this to management as a benefit to the company. He was an awesome co worker.
I work retail, I occasionally have to push carts. The corral is good enough. Also frankly, even leaving the cart loose in the parking lot is better imo than the people who leave their carts inside the store right in front of the racks of carts, but don’t actually rack it up(or even face it the right way to be racked up). As soon as even one person does it, everyone does it, and I have to waste fuck loads of time just clearing the entrances of loose carts.
Loose in the parking lot is bad to me because one good gust of wind can make the cart roll into a vehicle.
Eh, I don’t get paid enough to care about peoples cars, I just want them in the corrals so it’s easier to deal with them. I’ll of course stop a cart from hitting a car if it was my fault it was about to happen, but if the wind pushes a loose cart that’s between the car owners and god at that point. I drive a shitbox so I personally could not care less if a cart dings it.
It’s not your fault it’s the customers who don’t put their carts back combined with those of us who care about our cars.
I usually walk it back to the cart manufacturer, recycling is good
I have to chime in on this one, I grew up in Oregon and worked at Target a couple of years as a cashier and cart collector. This was by far the most miserable job I have ever had, it sucked. Besides leaving their nasty ass trash and dirty diapers in the carts people would leave them scattered all over the mall parking lot. It was my job to walk a mile or so around the lot that encircled the mall at closing time in the pouring rain and collect them. This was before they had the robots that push them for the workers, so we used a rope attached to the front to steer about 35-40 at once. With out fail id consantly get my sopping wet feet run over by those fucking things while trying to push them back to the store. Not to mention, we’d get the occasional wind storm and the ones that weren’t corraled would blow all over the parking lot crashing into cars. Then we’d get bitched at by the customers. Trust me when you put a cart back in the corral, the people working at the store appreciate it. There’s more than enough other work to get done in retail.
before they had the robots that push them for the workers
What you talking bout Willis? Doesn’t every store have some poor schmuck pushing them around by hand?
The store bolts a cart to one of these:
https://danetechnologies.com/shopping-cart-retrievers/
And then the person wrangling carts will pull carts out of the corral and load them up in front of this.
They carry a remote that makes the retriever move forward, so the employee can just stand at the front of the (sometimes surprisingly long) train of carts and steer it.
These things push way harder than a teenager in a back support belt could ever accomplish, so it both increases efficiency of retrieval (more carts at once) and reduces the chances of injury.
If they have a corral, I take from the corral and put back in the corral. If there’s a random cart between my car and the building, I grab that and return it to the corral.
The brief time I worked in a grocery store I liked when people didn’t return their carts, so I could go outside and fuck around
you can’t truly be a good person unless you establish was a bad person is first. Thats why I always murder someone on the way to the corral.
If it’s a mediocre corral you can call it a shooting at the ok corral
Any store that deserves compliance has corrals.
Unpopular opinion: If the parking lot is uncrowded then there’s nothing wrong with leaving your cart in an empty spot. Its not like the workers are gonna be given an extra breaktime if they don’t have to collect carts, the store is paying the workers per hours and will always make sure they have tasks to do 100% of the time no matter what happens. I’ve even heard online multiple store workers say they prefer collecting carts over many of the other tasks they have to do.
So if you aren’t giving the workers more work to do, and you aren’t inconveniencing other parkers, then i don’t see any harm in leaving a cart in a random empty parking spot of an uncrowded lot.
EDIT: just for the record, i do always return my carts, but i also think in some situations it’s completely pointless
I’ve even heard online multiple store workers say they prefer collecting carts over many of the other tasks they have to do.
Oh, a random person asserted a claim based on nothing? Well then, point well proven
EDIT: just for the record, i do always return my carts, but i also think in some situations it’s completely pointless
Still wrong. It’s been well demonstrated that there is always a point, be it courteousness or safety. Even if someone thinks it’s doing some kind of favour for the workers, it’s still creating an obstacle and/or hazard for other people using the parking lot.
You’ve failed the test.
Oh, a random person asserted a claim based on nothing? Well then, point well proven
Stay mad, savage.
Yes, I’m fuming. Quite.
Randomly placed carts are in the way and there is no reason ever to not put them away.
At the Walmart, I am careful to leave them in the center of the parking spot designated for our law enforcement partners. I’m sure our law enforcement partners find this kindness to be convenient, and time saving for them.
Ok, there is one reason.
