Cart Narcs
August 15, 2023 6:31 AM Subscribe

Along for the ride with Sebastian Davis, who’s built an empire of weaponized righteousness on YouTube based on a simple idea: Putting your shopping cart back is a test of your character [The Ringer]

“I think Cart Narcs has taken off because it’s just such a great study in the human condition,” Renae Ravey, a cohost on The Woody Show, told me over the phone. “Something as simple as putting a cart in a cart corral, and you get busted not doing it, and your immediate response is you want to beat this guy to death because he’s caught you. … I think that’s why people gravitate towards it.”

Cart Narcs [Youtube]

Mayor Lazybones? ‘Cart Narcs’ busts East Bay politician over unreturned shopping cart [The East Bay Times]

(previously)

posted by riruro (207 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite

I’m an aggressive cart returner and I never miss an opportunity to return mine. That golden glow of communal spirit, the red warmth of superiority over the non-returners.

Often on the way in I’ll return someone else’s cart, just to enjoy it coming and going.
posted by notyou at 6:46 AM on August 15, 2023 [36 favorites]

a young woman whose cart wheels had locked on her, the anti-theft mechanism having been inadvertently tripped

While I broadly agree that not returning carts makes you a bad person, when this happens you should be legally allowed to flip the cart over and set fire to it.
posted by Artw at 6:47 AM on August 15, 2023 [89 favorites]

from midway through the piece:

The slogan of The Woody Show is “Insensitivity training for a politically correct world,” and it can reasonably be described as a fairly conservative show. (A recurring segment is called “Redneck News.”) Davis said his personal politics lean more on the “independent-slash-libertarian” side of things, and that he and the cohosts don’t always align on politics.

so yeah i spent the first half of the article thinking "something about this guy makes me feel uncomfortable" and then i tripped across that paragraph and was like "yup. yup yup yup."
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:52 AM on August 15, 2023 [30 favorites]

This doesn't seem that much better than shithead YouTube pranksters who just make other people's lives difficult by being annoying.

It must be exhausting to be this mad at everyone all the time. Like, I get it, it sucks that there are people who don't do the right thing (and its worth remembering how ableist this can also be b/c this dude has no idea who he is approaching and what their life is like) and are making some worker do a bunch of extra laborious and taxing work, but to make an entire career out of farming this type of content....just feels kinda shitty.

But, content is content and I guess there's money to be had.
posted by Fizz at 6:53 AM on August 15, 2023 [51 favorites]

This article has something for everyone. I would love a 30 min interview with the person who pulled a firearm on someone calling them out for not returning a shopping cart. Do they feel good about doing that? Is that how they want to live? That's the real hook of the piece for me.
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 6:55 AM on August 15, 2023 [12 favorites]

whether or not it's taxing/extra laborious depends on the weather. if it's nice out — not too hot, not too cold, not rainy — returning carts in the parking lot is vastly more pleasant than any of the tasks inside the store.

if you're not returning your cart on a rainy day or in like 35 degree heat, though, you either have a good reason or are very, very selfish.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:55 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

I definitely don't understand the arbitrary decision to make this a moral issue appropriate for shaming or passing public judgement on strangers. I guess that outs me as someone who doesn't care, but also as someone who doesn't care at all when others don't do it. As long as they don't leave it blocking the parking lot, no big deal, I'll just grab one from the lot on the way into the store.
posted by Gable Oak at 6:57 AM on August 15, 2023 [15 favorites]

if i had infinite free time and pettiness i'd make a cart narc narc vest, follow him around, and post videos of every time he harangues a disabled person about whether or not they're actually disabled
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:59 AM on August 15, 2023 [59 favorites]

asshole has grand time pointing out what he thinks are other assholes. Film at butthead o'clock.
posted by mattgriffin at 7:03 AM on August 15, 2023 [36 favorites]

Christ, what an asshole.
posted by signal at 7:04 AM on August 15, 2023 [16 favorites]

It’s funny because I’ve seen the shopping cart thing and assumed it was an extremely leftist meme, and it’s funny that conservatives are into it. Rich people not paying their taxes is basically the same thing as not returning a shopping cart, and I would love to see him in a vest going up to people about to file stuff away to the Cayman Islands being like “hey buddy, that’s not where that money goes“
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:04 AM on August 15, 2023 [37 favorites]

Yeah, it’s a dumb thing to making a running piece about but on the other hand, put your cart back, people.
posted by Galvanic at 7:10 AM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

I have ashamedly not seen TFV but a. I am not a fan of weaponized righteousness and b. don’t even talk to me unless you TAKE a cart from the corral and push it in to shop. Dont @ me!!!1!
posted by drowsy at 7:11 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Fun fact: You can just quietly put your cart back and not be an asshole about whether or not other people also do it.

You can do that with a lot of things in life, turns out.
posted by bondcliff at 7:12 AM on August 15, 2023 [80 favorites]

A New Zealand Tiktoker posted this great take on the genre.
posted by firechicago at 7:12 AM on August 15, 2023 [16 favorites]

I always return my cart but it's a genuine hardship sometimes when doing the already exhausting work of shopping with young children (I know, I know, you shouldn't have had kids if you didn't want to juggle them and your groceries and a cart that keeps trying to roll away in a sloped parking lot on a rainy day) and I imagine there are other situations in which if the full context were known I wouldn't judge someone for not returning it. Ultimately, there have also been times I've been silently grateful to see a single cart off in the corner of the lot as it meant I could park my car in the shade by the cart and get my kid in the cart right there.

In short, this, like literally everything, is a more complex issue that hits any individual person differently for what are probably good reasons and I'm really not up to publicly harass people about this or basically anything else.
posted by potrzebie at 7:17 AM on August 15, 2023 [17 favorites]

This guy better be impeccable in how he treats waitstaff, just saying.
posted by Artw at 7:19 AM on August 15, 2023 [35 favorites]

"narc," in this case, is short for "narcissist."

on edit: no wait that is a lazy lazy joke i regret contributing to the whole "refer to everyone who's a jackass as a narcissist" trend it is a bad meme and bad to contribute to i take it back and also i feel shame
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:22 AM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

This will likely not be a popular opinion, but I do not put my cart back for the same reason I do not use self checkout lines. I imagine that someone is pleased to have a job retrieving carts and that if everyone puts their carts back it reduces the demand for labor overall. Sounds quaint I know. That being said, I am assiduous about putting my cart in a place where it can not randomly rollaway and damage someones car.

More jobs equals a better world for the working class. I was sad to see that Oregon recently eliminated their rules regarding someone at the station must pump your gas. We appear to be moving to a world where at some point there will be a chronic shortage of work. (AI, self service, efficiency, etc) I suppose this is good for the corporations but I do not think it is so good for the population at large. Time will tell.
posted by jcworth at 7:24 AM on August 15, 2023 [15 favorites]

I always return my cart but this guy seems like a jerk. That said, the phenomenon of violently aggressive reactions when getting caught doing something wrong is really fascinating and scary. Just this morning I was riding my bike to work and a driver decided she didn't want to wait in the line of car traffic, so she started to pull into the bike lane to pass everyone. I was right next to her. Luckily I had already seen her do this once when she was further ahead of me so I was prepared and able to yell and brake - and she had her window open so she heard me and stopped.

But what I didn't do was yell at her or flip her off, even though I would have been fully justified, because the behavior of drivers when you react to their dangerous behavior is sometimes scarier than the original offense. I've had drivers flip out at me for silently shaking my head or swerving out of the way when they approach an intersection so fast that it's unclear they plan to stop.

I'd be curious to know what the psychology of that reaction is. Like, is it covering up for shame? But don't you just feel even more shame later for overreacting?
posted by misskaz at 7:26 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

I made you all a handy infographic for the Cart Return Discourse.
posted by saladin at 7:28 AM on August 15, 2023 [14 favorites]

The cart thing is in isolation a nice little heuristic: doing a thing that's helpful to others, even when there's no real consequences for not doing it, is a good way to be! It totally makes sense to me that it got some momentum behind it when it first started making the rounds. But—and this has been a discussion at least a couple times before on the blue—a heuristic is just a heuristic, just an approximation; reality is complex, and making the jump from rule of thumb observation to ideological absolute is pretty much always a bad, flawed move.

And absolutely the core of why this particular scenario feels like such a petty, ugly turn on that nice-enough heuristic is that it's not even about taking the ideological aspect too much to heart: it's about having a cudgel. "Putting your shopping cart back is a test of your character" is being interpreted less as a lens through which to view someone's character as it is an opportunity to inflict tests on people. Cart narcing isn't about carts, it's about being a narc, and being the cop too, with all the fucked up incentives that come with that dynamic.
posted by cortex at 7:28 AM on August 15, 2023 [38 favorites]

Yeah, returning shopping carts is something that the giant corporations that run our corrupt grocery oligopoly pay their staff a pittance for, attaching a moral valence to labour that will help them further reduce headcount seems questionable at best.

Of course if you leave your cart in the middle of the adjacent parking spot then probably YTA but also the perpetrator may have mobility issues or is juggling their five kids with special needs or is depressed and has run out of spoons for the day so idk about judging that either.
posted by sid at 7:31 AM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

The handy infographic (for people reading this in the future when the link is dead):

SMALL BRAIN: Empty cart ain't my problem.

BRAIN: Only a jerk doesn't return their cart to the cart corral.

BIG BRAIN: Returning a cart is doing unpaid labor for a huge corporation.

GALAXY BRAIN: RIDE CART LIKE SCOOTER GO WHEEEE
posted by AlSweigart at 7:32 AM on August 15, 2023 [24 favorites]

> This will likely not be a popular opinion, but I do not put my cart back for the same reason I do not use self checkout lines. I imagine that someone is pleased to have a job retrieving carts and that if everyone puts their carts back it reduces the demand for labor overall

there's that weird "this is the best thing to do under capitalism i guess? even though it's shitty?" thing going on.

like, i would much, much rather live in a world where everyone individually kept grocery store parking lots tidy all by themselves and where people in oregon and new jersey or whatever didn't have to spend all day standing around breathing gas pump fumes because good lord i can pump my own gas, i kinda like pumping my own gas!

and 𝓯𝓾𝓻𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓶𝓸𝓻𝓮 i think it's fun to use the scanny-scanny beepy-beepy device inside the grocery store instead of standing around waiting for someone else to use the scanny-scanny beepy-beep for me, especially when that someone else has been made to play scanny-beepy so much that it's not fun for them anymore, but if everyone gets to pump gas for themselves and use the scannybeep for themselves then the person who's paid to breathe gas pump fumes and the person who's paid to use the scannybeep so much that they hate it wouldn't have any money to give to the guy who makes them pay to live in a place.

and so we're stuck, i guess, making other people do things they hate and that also people should get to do for themselves, because otherwise i guess those other people won't get to live inside anymore? stupid, stupid, stupid, top to bottom stupid, but it's what we're stuck with i guess.

in conclusion: scanny scanny pumpy pumpy beepy beepy yay.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:33 AM on August 15, 2023 [23 favorites]

My local Aldi store does the quarter-deposit thing to encourage people to clean up their carts. That seems to work, there are no stray carts there. But oddly, quite a few shoppers put the quarter in, use the cart, return the cart, then leave the quarter behind. I can't tell if that's laziness, ignorance, charity, pride, or some sort of modest protest.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:34 AM on August 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

A lot of things fall into this category. In one of his books, restaurateur Danny Meyer's counsels "not making someone else's job harder" which I've always taken to heart. Depositing your shopping cart in one of the corrals in the parking lot before leaving easily counts as making someone else's job just a little easier. You don't have to walk it back into the store.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:36 AM on August 15, 2023 [9 favorites]

I definitely don't understand the arbitrary decision to make this a moral issue appropriate for shaming or passing public judgement on strangers.

I feel like that's just The Discourse anymore, though. Around ten years ago, someone, possibly The Oatmeal, did an infographic about the Oxford comma, and suddenly it became A Thing. People were identifying as Oxford comma Stans in their twitter bio.

People are looking for identities and things to differentiate themselves from others, and if those identities can have the veneer of moral superiority, so much the better. I can remember being deeply invested in the proposition that both rap and country music were objectively inferior to the alt-rock that I preferred to listen to, for instance.
posted by gauche at 7:37 AM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

Around ten years ago, someone, possibly The Oatmeal, did an infographic about the Oxford comma,

where does the vampire weekend song come into it though

also ime the oxford comma thing's primary role, back when it was a thing, was a class-sorting tool for people on dating sites/dating apps. like, having either an opinion or (as in the vampire weekend song) a loud non-opinion on the oxford comma was a way to signal that you only date 𝓬𝓸𝓵𝓵𝓮𝓰𝓲𝓪𝓽𝓮 𝓽𝔂𝓹𝓮𝓼
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:41 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

GALAXY BRAIN: RIDE CART LIKE SCOOTER GO WHEEEE

Universe Brain/Glendale Kroger Parking Lot Brain: Flip cart over a fire and use it as a grill.
posted by charred husk at 7:59 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm cart returner, but I shouldn't be credited with altruism or responsible societal duty, I just like pushing carts around in parking lots.
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:01 AM on August 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

I guess that outs me as someone who doesn't care

Count me as another. Naturally I return my cart (at the big-box grocery that doesn't have any of the hand-carried baskets I favor, like at Trader Joes) but it's just a parking lot. Who gives a shit? (My answer to that was, up until this thread: only busy-bodies on Reddit.)
posted by Rash at 8:03 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I return shopping carts, and will even grab one and put it up (or take it into the store) if it's blocking a parking space. Back when I was in High School, I did the cart return thing, and it wasn't fun. Sure, it was a break from the monotony inside, but returning carts also got monotonous pretty quickly, and at least inside was air conditioned. Having to wander around the giant parking lot to retrieve random carts didn't make the job any more fun, either.
(Also, the store was at the top of a big hill. If you let your cart go, chances were good that it'd sooner or later take off down the hill. If it didn't slam into a car at the bottom, it would probably jam itself into the sewer opening. Good luck getting it out.) We didn't have those motorized assist machines, either. We'd have to double up, with one person at the front guiding the the cart train, and the other in the back, pushing them in their car. (That got outlawed by management, when a couple of sackers managed to take out one of the big panes of glass at the front that way.)
Good times. That was the first job to give me nightmares. Anyway, all these people look like assholes. Both the ones behaving badly, and the ones going around calling them out for it, as their hobby (job?).
posted by Spike Glee at 8:08 AM on August 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

I imagine that someone is pleased to have a job retrieving carts and that if everyone puts their carts back it reduces the demand for labor overall.

So, busywork. I never liked busywork, it felt condescending.

Also I'm pretty sure money generally flows up, not down. I can't see a company shelling out for another person on carts unless the parking lot is consistently an absolute disaster, which would be miserable.
posted by Baethan at 8:10 AM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

Definitely a cart-rider! It is so much fun.

Cart Narc dude is a classic example of taking something nominally uncontroversial - it is good behavior to put your cart back - and turning it into something so goddamn annoying that it makes me want to push carts into oncoming traffic. You can literally hear in the guy's voice how he isn't really listening to or empathizing with anyone, he's just waiting to do his "WHEEE-OOOO" thing and thinks his antics are so hilarious. Hard pass.

FWIW I am a steadfast cart-returner.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:10 AM on August 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

Less than a month after I bought my very first car, I came out of the grocery store, and noticed someone across the parking aisle and a couple spaces down from me just leave their cart (even though the corral was two parking spots away from them). Rolled my eyes at them but didn’t think much of it. Then, when I was returning my cart, the wind grabbed their cart and ran it into my brand new car, making a big dent in the bumper.

So yes, leaving your cart in the middle of the parking lot is antisocial and causes actual harm at times. Especially if you leave it in the way for the accessible parking spaces - which from what I’ve observed happens way more often than people having had to park far away from a cart corral in the outer reaches of a parking lot not returning their cart.
posted by eviemath at 8:11 AM on August 15, 2023 [12 favorites]

And what my local stores have all done, instead of hire people to corral carts, is just put up signs in their parking lots disclaiming responsibility if your car or person gets damaged by a wayward cart.
posted by eviemath at 8:12 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

> So, busywork. I never liked busywork, it felt condescending.

yeah but we’re in a shitty planet where if you take away someone’s busywork that no one should have to do then they don’t have enough money to give to the guy who makes them pay money to live indoors.

it’s a pickle, is what it is. a fuckin’ pickle.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:13 AM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

I also want to say that I have not returned a shopping cart in years.

(because I always go to the supermarket with my partner and our division of labor is that they return the cart while I close up the trunk and start the car)
posted by firechicago at 8:13 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

One advantage of the Aldi quarter thing is that random people will happily take your cart back for you, after you're done unloading it.
posted by Spike Glee at 8:14 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

1. I don't return. Someone has a paying job to return them.
2. Europe has solved the problem. 1€ deposit.
posted by davebarnes at 8:16 AM on August 15, 2023

Seems to me this is for the views. Same schtick as 1st Amendment audits. Show up, make a fuss about a more-or-less-pretended principle* you can make other people feel something about, get angry, profit.
*who knows who is pretending and who isn't? Not I.
posted by aesop at 8:18 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

I would love a 30 min interview with the person who pulled a firearm on someone calling them out for not returning a shopping cart. Do they feel good about doing that? Is that how they want to live?

Anyone willing to threaten people with public humiliation or violence for some made-up standard of Obviously Correct Behavior isn't stopping at shopping carts.
posted by mhoye at 8:19 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

so this guy's got a pet peeve and he thinks that ought to give him carte blanche to video everyone who pisses him off
posted by pyramid termite at 8:20 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty sure not returning my carts would be the easiest way I could disappoint my father. I'd do the conversation about how my spouse was transitioning a hundred times before I'd let him see me do that. I fully endorse it as a moral principle, but "don't be a asshole to random people over your moral principles" is also one of my moral principles, so I don't endorse this dude.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 8:20 AM on August 15, 2023 [9 favorites]

So, busywork. I never liked busywork, it felt condescending.

I mean I don't think this is where you're coming from but this is logic that I've seen white collar folks use when eliminating labour that require blue collar workers. "I wouldn't like this work so no one should have to do it" is not really sound logic, you have no idea what those workers' dispositions toward the task are.
posted by sid at 8:23 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

> so this guy's got a pet peeve and he thinks that ought to give him carte blanche to video everyone who pisses him off

in this case it's spelled "cart blanche," because it's about shopping carts.

𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤 𝕙𝕒𝕤 𝕓𝕖𝕖𝕟 𝕪𝕠𝕦𝕣 𝕗𝕣𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕙 𝕝𝕖𝕤𝕤𝕠𝕟 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕥𝕠𝕕𝕒𝕪
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:23 AM on August 15, 2023 [18 favorites]

I do the same thing at Home Depot with paint. If I only need a half gallon, but it's cheaper to buy a gallon than two quarts, I just dump out what I know I won't need in the parking lot. That being said, I am assiduous about dumping the paint in a place where someone is not likely to step in it (like right near the cart corral). If more people did this, Home Depot would have to hire even more people to clean up the paint in their parking lots. I'm a job creator.

Dumping toxic chemicals and what is essentially vandalism is a pretty egregious false equivalency to leaving a cart outside the cart corral.
posted by sid at 8:24 AM on August 15, 2023 [10 favorites]

I am 100% team Don't Volunteer for a For-Profit, so when it comes to helping out the store or its staff I don't even need to get to the special case of whether returning carts somehow deprives workers of their wages.

That said, I remain 100% team Return Your Damn Carts because to do so is part of the basic pact with your fellow humans in the parking lot, for whom loose carts (a) block parking spaces, (b) are a hazard to vehicles and pedestrians, and (c) can result in there being no easily accessible carts.

It is sad to say that a $1 deposit is probably more effective than adherence to the social contract...
posted by MattD at 8:25 AM on August 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

So if I don't return my cart:
- I'm helping a supermarket employee get a few more hours
- and helping content creators make money on Youtube...
- causing more DSLR's and Mics to be sold as more wannabe content creators wanna get in on the game
- causing Shure and Nikon to build more gadgets, hiring more people in their factories and engineers
- causing those employees to have more money to spend at the local supermarkets where they leave the cart out in the carpark to pay it forward.
Infinite money glitch?!

I work in food retail— we're not going to let our cart guy go if everyone able started always putting the carts back to the store entrance. He'd still need to fetch 'em from the corrals, or fetch the carts loose in the carpark, but he'd just have a bit more time to help overladen customers, or do general tidy-work around the area.
posted by Static Vagabond at 8:25 AM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

My favourite parts of retail jobs were collecting the carts

I too herded the silver buffalo!

I was going out in rain, snow, or sleet in any case, so leaving your cart down the hill wasn't creating a job for me. Any more than taking a crap on the bathroom floor gave me a paying job to clean it up. It was just extra work on top of the rest of "store maintenance."
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:25 AM on August 15, 2023 [17 favorites]

"Dumping toxic chemicals and what is essentially vandalism is a pretty egregious false equivalency to leaving a cart outside the cart corral."

Not as egregious as you missing the joke.
posted by jonathanhughes at 8:27 AM on August 15, 2023 [15 favorites]

But also, fuck this guy, he's an attention whore. Chastising people for attention is also an unacceptable social wrong.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:28 AM on August 15, 2023 [10 favorites]

Is everyone speaking the same language here? I feel like some people are describing "placing the cart in the cart corral in the parking lot, but not taking it back to the actual building" as "not returning the cart" which is... not what "not returning the cart" is.
posted by obfuscation at 8:31 AM on August 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

I hate this guy, he sucks. Not that the people he encounters don't also suck. But I also think the shopping cart thing as an example of your level of basic human decency or adherence to the "social contract" (lol, we don't have one, never did, silly early modern political fantasies) is stupid. Shopping cart return is a parking lot design problem. It's a problem created by cars. Cars are the problem. Destroy the cars, cart narc. Car Narc.
posted by dis_integration at 8:33 AM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

i declare new thread topic!!

people who sell things other than their labor time go to great lengths to drive up demand for those things, often deploying very wasteful and/or dishonest techniques to do so. the topics for discussion:

is it a good idea for people who sell their labor time to drive up demand for labor time, even if it requires deploying very wasteful and/or dishonest techniques to do so?
when people who, lacking anything else to sell, unilaterally disarm (i.e. refuse to use wasteful or dishonest techniques to drive up demand for labor time) are those people making the world worse or better? remember to consider long-range effects; if the people who sell non-labor-time commodities have access to effective tactics that people who sell labor time as a commodity don't get to use, does the resultant additional power imbalance result in more waste or less?

posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:34 AM on August 15, 2023

I also think that it sounds like the guy in the link is being an over-self-righteous asshole. But the folks here defending not putting their shopping cart in a corral and just leaving it sitting out in the parking lot are not engaging in some righteous crusade either. It’s the same as not tipping because you oppose the idea of tipping on principle: you’re not striking a blow against capitalism, you’re just harming other worker cogs in the short run and being an asshole. Stores don’t hire more cart collector people if more shoppers are assholes and leave their carts lying around un-corralled, they just expect the current staff to do more work in the same amount of time and regardless of weather conditions; just as restaurants don’t start thinking they should maybe pay a living wage in the first place when more of their customers refuse to tip, they just do more wage theft or only top up the tipped wage to the minimum wage rather than the actual living wage that food service workers can sometimes make with tips.
posted by eviemath at 8:41 AM on August 15, 2023 [18 favorites]

Carts of Darkness

Murray Siple's feature-length documentary follows a group of homeless men who have combined bottle picking with the extreme sport of racing shopping carts down the steep hills of North Vancouver. This subculture depicts street life as much more than the stereotypes portrayed in mainstream media. The film takes a deep look into the lives of the men who race carts, the adversity they face and the appeal of cart racing despite the risk.

From the National Film Board of Canada
posted by philip-random at 8:47 AM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

I always return my cart, but I live in Manhattan, so cart return is usually about five feet from the register (15 feet if one is at the far register). My equivalent thing is my burning hatred for people who look at their phones while sitting on the weight machines I want to use at the gym.
posted by AJaffe at 8:47 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Not as egregious as you missing the joke.

I didn't read your comment as humorous (I mean I didn't find it funny), I thought you were trying to make the point that thoughtless behaviour shouldn't be justified as providing employment for others. Which, on the whole, I agree with, but I'm on team don't judge non-cart-returners.

I think there are a range of offenses one can commit in a retail setting, ranging from outright malicious, wasteful, and harmful (your theoretical example, and bondcliff's), to thoughtless but perhaps justifiable given personal circumstances. Leaving carts outside the corral IMO fall into the latter but the other examples are definitely in the former.
posted by sid at 8:47 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

eviemath, 100% right and i feel shame and regrets re: having participated in the line of thought
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:52 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I mean I don't think this is where you're coming from but this is logic that I've seen white collar folks use when eliminating labour that require blue collar workers.
Right, I mean busywork in the broad sense of "a task that was made up purely to keep someone busy and has little to no meaning otherwise". If we're talking about artificially creating work so that people can have money, why not just.....give people money
posted by Baethan at 8:54 AM on August 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

I don't return mine very often because I don't like leaving my kids in the car alone! I try and park next to a cart dropoff spot when I can.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:55 AM on August 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

yeah but we’re in a shitty planet where if you take away someone’s busywork

for the record, US of America is not the entirety of the planet. There are a number of economies that have figured a way to keep people out of poverty without imposing meaningless labour on them.
posted by philip-random at 8:55 AM on August 15, 2023 [10 favorites]

I've noticed an odd thing at my local grocery store... It's squeezed into a tight bit of real estate against a hillside, so they've resorted to a fairly small two-level parking garage. When I park on the top level, I almost never see a stray cart (though the corrals are often chaotic with carts shoved in at random angles). But on the bottom level, even though it has a couple of corrals too, there are always some carts left here and there plus a conglomeration abandoned in a little no-parking area. My guess is that the broad daylight of the top level discourages people from being lazy in clear sight of other shoppers.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:00 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I would love to see him in a vest going up to people about to file stuff away to the Cayman Islands being like “hey buddy, that’s not where that money goes“

That's what I'm saying, if you're going to spend your time publicly shaming people who are violating the social contract in ways that harm others, maybe start with the consequential stuff.

I feel like some people are describing "placing the cart in the cart corral in the parking lot, but not taking it back to the actual building" as "not returning the cart" which is... not what "not returning the cart" is.

As obfuscation clarifies (heh), there is a bit of a false dilemma in the thread: "putting the cart back" typically means putting it in the cart corrals in the parking lot, not taking it all the way back to the store. So if everyone puts their carts back in that manner, there is still labor for the store-escaping, cart-gathering employee to perform, by collecting all carts in the corrals at regular intervals.

"Not putting the cart back" to mean only taking it to the corral, is actually putting the cart back. "Not putting the cart back" to mean just leaving it out in the parking lot, next to where you were parked, is definitely undesirable, because it inconveniences (or possibly poses a danger to) other shoppers using that facility. It is Bad Citizen Behavior. But so is publicly shaming people. Especially if you record it and post it online for that sweet youtube ad revenue.
posted by LooseFilter at 9:00 AM on August 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Just a side note to reiterate that, from my personal experience of damage to my car, leaving your cart uncorralled in a parking lot is not a harmless, victimless activity.
posted by eviemath at 9:01 AM on August 15, 2023 [9 favorites]

The original shopping cart theory was a 4chan post:

"The shopping cart is the ultimate test for whether someone is self-governing.

To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you, or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.

A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it.

The Shopping Cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society."

Here, one more time with emphasis:

"The shopping cart is the ultimate test for whether someone is self-governing.

.... Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you, or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart."

So, not only is this guy an asshole, if it becomes widely known that cart narcs are a thing, and that by returning your cart you might avoid an unpleasant interaction with an asshole, then cart narcs will have actually destroyed the value of the shopping cart test. Goodhart's Law in action.
posted by mstokes650 at 9:03 AM on August 15, 2023 [14 favorites]

As obfuscation clarifies

I try ;)
posted by obfuscation at 9:04 AM on August 15, 2023 [10 favorites]

I'd be curious to know what the psychology of that reaction is. Like, is it covering up for shame? But don't you just feel even more shame later for overreacting?

Yes, I think it's definitely shame-driven, people react in crazy and unpredictable ways when they're caught doing something they're not supposed to be doing, on any level. In my experience, anger is the most common defensive reaction. And a lot of people probably do feel more shame later, maybe when they're at home and reflecting on their angry outburst...but that's at home, and in private, and shame is a lot easier to deal with in private.
posted by LooseFilter at 9:07 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Or they also redirect their shame in private as domestic violence :/
posted by eviemath at 9:08 AM on August 15, 2023

Using one instance of a human being's behavior, when they might be the only time they did the thing, is ridiculous. Have some empathy for others and apathy for other's actions that do little harm.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:09 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Anyway, people who don't put their carts back will never know the satisfying feeling of pushing all the carts in the corral together into one giant mega-cart.
posted by bondcliff at 9:09 AM on August 15, 2023 [22 favorites]

My favourite parts of retail jobs were collecting the carts, getting to escape the horrific hellmouth of whatever box retail place I was trapped in and feeling the weather on my face. If you’ve ever worked a job where you turn up for work before sunrise and leave after sunset, stuck in a box with no outside view, leave a cart out for your fellow worker.

I've heard something similar regarding reshelving things in a store: that all the time spent reshelving things that customers had left in random places around the store was time not spent interacting with annoying customers. Maybe I heard it here!

There was a meme on Facebook years ago that oddly happened to pop into my head yesterday before I saw anything about Cart Narcs. It claimed that Glenn Danzig said cart-returning was the ultimate test of character, and basically anyone who didn't was a total piece of shit. I don't know/remember anything about Danzig, but it struck me as "Hey everyone, by most normal metrics I'm an asshole, so can we just agree to judge everyone by this one good thing that I do consistently?"
posted by pinothefrog at 9:09 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

The bit about judging whether people are faking disabilities or not also stands out as a non-harmless conservative worldview thing.
posted by Artw at 9:12 AM on August 15, 2023 [14 favorites]

Anyway, people who don't put their carts back will never know the satisfying feeling of pushing all the carts in the corral together into one giant mega-cart.

Or the sadness of trying to push into a stall full of mismatched carts...
posted by pinothefrog at 9:12 AM on August 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Just a side note to reiterate that, from my personal experience of damage to my car, leaving your cart uncorralled in a parking lot is not a harmless, victimless activity.

I 100% agree. I think there are a range of behaviours here, ranging from the possibly harmful to the harmless and possibly beneficial:

1. Leave your cart in the parking spot next to yours: possibly harmful as cart may get knocked into other cars or people, only maximizes your own convenience
2. Leave the cart in the berm near your car: harmless but perhaps creates more work for hapless store employees, more convenient for you
3. Take the cart to the corral: harmless and minimizes work for your fellow worker, less convenient for you
4. Leave the cart in an area which is more convenient to you, doesn't impede store egress or ingress, and allows a fellow shopper to pick up the cart more easily than if it were in a corral: Less work for you, less work for the store workers, more convenient for fellow shoppers

EDIT: But I think we can all agree that Sebastian Davis is a jerk
posted by sid at 9:13 AM on August 15, 2023

Yeah, I’m also puzzled about the conflation of “bring a cart back to the corral so it doesn’t damage someone’s car” and “walk back to the store.”

BIG BRAIN: Returning a cart is doing unpaid labor for a huge corporation.

Again, much depends on the definition. All the Shoppers Drug Marts in Canada seem to have replaced the bulk of their cashiers with self-checkout machines, which at the end of the process, cheerily chirp without irony, “Tell us how we did today!” I selected the items and brought them to the front, then (if I had used the machine), I rang them up and bagged them. What is the “we” involved here? Am I supposed to give them five stars because someone got the jar onto a shelf before I arrived?

In Loblaw stores (under the same ownership as SDM), there is always a cluster of self-checkout machines and a ~~Judas goat~~ customer service assistant urging me to use these rather than wait for a cashier. I occasionally think of remind them that chairman and CEO Galen Weston Jr. is paid $11.3 million a year, and as soon as he starts paying me I will consider doing some work for him.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:19 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

I wonder what the customs in Japan are. This strikes me as one of those things where you would be insulting the lot attendants if you did your job for them.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:21 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Perhaps it’s worth pointing out that, until I saw it myself, I never expected a shopping cart - especially an all-metal one without flat plastic areas - to get particularly caught by the wind and get going at a fast enough clip to dent my car. It wasn’t an especially stormy evening either, maybe just a bit blustery but normal weather. If the parking lot has grassy or dirt-topped berms where you can leave a cart out of the way of parking spaces and also hooked so that it can’t go anywhere, that’s mildly annoying for the cart collectors but yeah, not causing particular harm (none of my current area parking lots are so fancy, but I know the ones you mean). But even leaving your cart in a non-berm (or paved over berm), non-parking spot, not walking space area of the parking lot leaves it vulnerable to running off on its own and hitting something.
posted by eviemath at 9:22 AM on August 15, 2023

Metafilter: 𝓯𝓾𝓻𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓶𝓸𝓻𝓮
posted by Space Kitty at 9:24 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

so just to be clear here, I shouldn't feel ashamed anymore about pissing and shitting and vomiting in parking lots. I'm actually doing my bit to overthrow capitalism

[sarcasm]
posted by philip-random at 9:25 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

I don't return mine very often because I don't like leaving my kids in the car alone! I try and park next to a cart dropoff spot when I can.

There is a local grocery store chain here that has signs in the parking spots close to a cart corral for shoppers with children. When my kid was tiny, those spots were so dang convenient. On arrival, I could grab a cart and strap the kiddo in and on departure it was super easy to deposit her into her seat, put the groceries in the car and then run the cart to the nearby corral.
posted by NoMich at 9:25 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

> Anyway, people who don't put their carts back will never know the satisfying feeling of pushing all the carts in the corral together into one giant mega-cart.

Or the sadness of trying to push into a stall full of mismatched carts...

God, when there's a confusion of large and small carts ramshackled together in a corral it creates such a powerful ambivalence within me: I both resent aesthetically and mechanically the poor use of space and lack of proper inventory management (and so want to FIX IT) and also recoil with horror at the idea of actually doing the frustrating work of Sokoban-ing a bunch of carts with dodgy wheels around in a confined space.

It's an internal war that manages, every time, to briefly eclipse any consideration of lesser, more straightforward questions like "why would I volunteer to rearrange a cart corral for fuck's sake". It usually only lasts a second and then I just put the cart in the least aesthetically upsetting spot in the mess that I can, but, woof. Bad vibes. Urban hex.
posted by cortex at 9:45 AM on August 15, 2023 [12 favorites]

I like to stand 8-10 feet away from the nearest cart in the corral & try to hit it with my cart dead-on & forcefully enough that the two carts combine, sometimes random shoppers congratulate me for getting it & that's fun

my take on this show is that it sucks when people don't return their shopping carts but it really really sucks to make someone's day worse based on a rigid unempathetic ableist template of human morality & this guy is a complete & total asshole
posted by taquito sunrise at 9:48 AM on August 15, 2023 [18 favorites]

For clarity, I too define "returning the cart" as "putting in the dedicated cart return station in the parking lot." That both prevents rogue carts from rolling into cars and people and still preserves the job of taking those carts from the corral and shepherding them to the entrance area.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:52 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

It is unclear to me that anyone is actually confused by this.
posted by Artw at 9:54 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

but is it clear to you that no one is confused?
posted by philip-random at 9:58 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

metafilter in a nutshell
posted by Baethan at 10:01 AM on August 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

I don't return mine very often because I don't like leaving my kids in the car alone!

My aunt Thelma used to love to tell the story of the time she was visiting us when I was a toddler, and took me to the store with her to buy a few things she needed to make one of my mother's favorite childhood dishes.

She put me in one of those carts where the kid can sit on a little shelf facing the parent with their legs sticking out of a couple of openings, and in the course of shopping she remembered she needed something she’d seen in the orevious aisle, so she pushed the cart up against one shelf of the aisle we were on and went back around the corner to get it.

By the time she came back less than 15 seconds later, I had knocked two large glass jars of honey off the shelf and shattered them on the floor, and I had also somehow ripped open a box of Uncle Ben's rice and poured its contents down onto the spreading pool of honey and glass.

She said it was the worst mess she’d ever seen in a grocery store, and one of the most embarrassing incidents of her life to date.

Some kids, you just can’t leave to their own devices.
posted by jamjam at 10:02 AM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it.

The Shopping Cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society.

Of course this sewage seeped out of 4chan. Of course it did. It's got that special 4chan combination of simpering pious moralizing and rank cruelty. Just remember that the dehumanizing language is always just a jjjjooooookkkkke for exaggerated effect, until it's not.

My reply to all this is the same as what's been pointed out in the recent thread on David Brooks's article about "gee, why aren't people nice any more?" Why is it such a surprise that people care less and less about politeness and rule-following when it becomes increasingly clear that the system we are part of is the farthest thing from polite, that the most powerful beneficiaries of this system can publicly break rules and make up new ones with no consequence?

This stuff reminds me of the recent fad on Reddit for posting about maddening interactions with Doordash drivers. It's like, look, Doordash and its ilk treat their employees with such blatant disrespect that from a legal standpoint they aren't even considered employees. But people find it much, much easier to get angry at the delivery driver who did a half-ass job than to get angry at the corporation that treats its "independent contractors" as half-ass employees. When systems treat people as worthless and one rule after another is revealed to be arbitrary, people will respond accordingly.
posted by cubeb at 10:07 AM on August 15, 2023 [11 favorites]

I don't return mine very often because I don't like leaving my kids in the car alone!

according to this one-eyed Republican Joe Rogan's talking to, that's okay as long as you feel bad about it.
posted by philip-random at 10:09 AM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

More jobs equals a better world for the working class.

The reductive "more jobs" does not equal a "better world" for the working class.

This is a neoliberal position linguistically masquerading as a revolutionary communist one.
posted by rhymedirective at 10:17 AM on August 15, 2023 [14 favorites]

Re cart returning as a social action. Where i live and shop (Vienna, Austria in the inner city, usually Hofer which is the Austrian branch of Aldi) , carts are kept inside the stores, or just outside the entrance, and many stores do not even have a parking lot. Only very large stores in outer districts of Vienna have parking lots and cart corrals. Also outside Vienna, small towns or shopping malls usually have parking lots and cart corrals.
All carts wherever they are have coin operated chains, linking carts together. Most offer a mechanism that accepts 50 Cents, one Euro or two Euro coins. Large chains often give out plastic tokens as a freebie.
So as a shopper there is the incentive to return your cart to get your money back, or your token which can be very handy when you don't have change.
In urban grocery stores where carts are inside or by the entrance outside there is an added incentive or actually deterrent in that the wheels of carts taken outside or further than the outside corral lock if pushed too far.
Many urban stores where carts are kept directly by the entrance (so just outside) have a homeless person (who basically "owns" the spot and is doing this with the quasi permission of the staff) who offers to return your cart into the corral (usually just two or three metres) and gets to keep your coin, and most people also offer additional coins.
The big stores with huge parking lots have employees looking after misplaced carts.
Originally the coin system was implemented many years ago to deter homeless people from taking a cart for themselves. Shoppers here don't use their cars to shop as there are no parking lots. Many people have shopping trolleys , use small Shops Close to Home and use public transport. (As an aside no store offers to bag your shopping ever, you are expected to do so yourself at rapid speed to avoid long queues).
During the pandemic the coin system was suspended for hygiene reason, as were cash payments who until the were limited to sums above 10 Euro.
posted by 15L06 at 10:27 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Another side note: although often not clearly advertised, many grocery stores offer a carry-out service, where the same employee who would bring carts back in from the cart corral will also help bring your cart full of groceries out to your vehicle, and even pack them into your trunk for you. Folks trying to shop while wrangling multiple small children (especially if they aren’t the sort of young ‘un’s you can safely strap them all into car seats, put bags in the car, return the cart, then double check the car seats before driving home) should ask for that service! (Also offered for seniors and people with mobility limitations, though understandable if someone with a hidden disability is worried about potential disbelief and shaming and so avoids asking.)
posted by eviemath at 10:35 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Carts of Darkness

Holy shit, that is exactly where I am from. Spent my teen and young adult years up and down those streets. One of the shots in West Van was exactly out in front of my first GF's house. I have shopped in many of those supermarkets!

Thanks for the link!
posted by Meatbomb at 10:38 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

I imagine that someone is pleased to have a job retrieving carts and that if everyone puts their carts back it reduces the demand for labor overall.

As someone who had exactly that job at Home Depot 25ish years ago, if I knew you were that kind of person, I would have “returned” your cart into your driver’s side door as hard as I was physically able. Hell, I might have even used my forklift to do so.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 10:43 AM on August 15, 2023 [14 favorites]

These videos pop up on my TikTok feed all the time. I always figured they were staged, thinking nobody would actually react so strongly to being called out for not returning a cart (some definitely have a “a gun is about to be pulled” vibe). Finding out they are legitimate was actually kind of surprising.
posted by The Gooch at 10:58 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was reading Michael Schur's book How to be Perfect (mentioned in the article) a few months ago, and I came to the opposite conclusion reached in the article.
Unless he was actually being facetious, he really sounded like he just left his carts randomly in the parking lot. And now I think about it every time I go shopping.
I'm not even asking for folks to put things back where they found them- usually not in a corral- but don't leave them blocking everyone else.
But even worse, I've twice had people abandon their carts in the checkout lane in front of me, like I'm supposed to deal with it.

Someone has a paying job to return them.
I really doubt that's anyone's full-time job. It's something extra someone has to do instead of something useful like restocking shelves or checking clients out.
The grocery store has someone to do "cleanup on aisle 7", but that doesn't mean we should spill stuff to keep someone employed.
posted by MtDewd at 10:59 AM on August 15, 2023 [9 favorites]

no one has posted the cart meme?

https://ruinmyweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/this-shopping-cart-morality-test-has-got-people-up-in-arms-about-parking-lot-etiquette.jpg

Cart Narcs just shine a light on the tragedy of the commons, much like speeding camera tickets, people hate it because they can get caught.
posted by vincentmeanie at 11:13 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I take this further by moving products around to the wrong aisles, sticking my thumb into peaches, knocking glass jars of grape jelly off the shelves, that sort of thing. I feel pretty good about making so many jobs.

Yes, but if you're not going out and breaking their windows too, then you're singlehandedly responsible for glazier unemployment.
posted by jackbishop at 11:17 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

I work a retail job on weekends. I have opinions about cart returning. These opinions aren't work a thing, but I'll put them here anyway....

1. There are people for whom shopping in itself is a hardship. Those folks get a pass. You cannot tell who those people are, so don't judge.
2. Very few stores have the motorized cart return thing. It makes the job easier and why would corporate expend $ on anything that actually made the worker's job easier....
3. People who leave their carts pushed up on grassy medians should just stop. It makes a hard job even harder.
4. People who leave their carts in the middle of another parking space are highly suspect, but maybe, just maybe they are #1 uplist. But, don't do that otherwise.
5. Leaving the carts in random places to make retail jobs better is not helping because nowadays we are so short staffed that there are not enough people as is. And then we run our of carts and then customers come and find me and ask where are "your" carts. IDK, maybe they are out in the parking lot where you just walked past them? So, then, I have to go make a special trip out to get the special person their own special cart. Whew, glad to get that off my mind....
6. Customers who put their carts in the corral are great. Good, now the cart will not roll away and can be more readily returned.
7. Customers who roll in a cart as they are entering are even better.
8. Customers who roll in the cart they were using are shocking.
9. Customers who bring up their cart and an additional cart???? What planet dropped them off, because I'm moving there.

Summary. The opportunity to get in carts is not a bonus or make-work benefit for us poor widdle disadvantaged retail workers. We are busting butt to give you the best customer service we can and our spoons are now sporks.
posted by mightshould at 11:17 AM on August 15, 2023 [27 favorites]

Interesting discussion. One twist we have were I shop is that people coming to shop and seeing you walking a cart back or even unloading your groceries will ask if they can return it for you.
posted by Michael_H at 11:18 AM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Whether I return my cart or not depends on how heavy my groceries are.

If they are very light, I drop my cart off on the way out the door, although many grocery stores are actually poorly designed for this and with one way doors and whatnot and it's usually a pain in the ass. Sometimes if there is a line up of abandoned carts outside the exit, I will just add mine to the line.

If they are medium heavy, then I will take the cart to the far end of the parking lot nearest my way home and leave it at the last possible location before leaving the grounds of the store. There's no cart corral there, but lots of people do that, and I try to keep my cart tidy with their carts. The parking lot is only about 10% of the walk home from the store, but it's still worth the risk to my moral standing to not have to carry groceries on my back any further than necessary.

If my groceries are very heavy, then I will have to wait for the bus to take me up the hill and there is a cart corral right next to where you cross the street to catch the bus, so I leave it there.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:19 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I wonder if cart narc fans ever recognize him in the parking lot, and then deliberately don't return a cart in order to get free cart swag and maybe a fun interaction.
posted by surlyben at 11:29 AM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Cart Narcs just shine a light on the tragedy of the commons, much like speeding camera tickets, people hate it because they can get caught.

So, I'm a "return your cart" guy. Every time! I return it. I try to make sure the world is no worse as part of my existence. I do sometimes do the "try to get it in there from a distance like a 3-point shot" but unlike the earlier poster nobody has ever cared, and if I (rarely) miss I will get it back in there.

But... I'm also a guy who got caught by a "speeding" camera for doing a right turn on red without coming to a full and complete stop with a fine of over $400. Did I reduce my speed to less than 2mph? Yes I did! Was there any traffic I was turning into? No there wasn't! Did my car technically move forward on every 30fps frame of video evidence? Yes, it did. Was I putting anyone in any form of danger? No. Not at all. Was it fair? No. It was an exceedingly minor technical violation, and it was not fair, and we should not be judged by very mild transgressions.

We need to consider the extent of the transgression and harm done as part of the enforcement, and honestly, these Cart Narc people just seem like jerks.

Yet also... I had an injury that I could not get an operation for during peak COVID in 2020 (it's fixed, I'm all good). I had to use a cane, had no more than around 100 feet of walking before exhaustion, and there is no question that I had a disability and had to park in disability spaces (and had obtained a valid permit). I had to make regular trips to my local drug store and grocery stores, and the number of people who parked in handicapped spaces who did not seem to have any impairment whatsoever - young people, in their 20s, moving quickly - astounded me. It's tainted my perception of people. There is no question that, even as a bleeding-heart liberal well aware of invisible illnesses - handicapped permit fraud is massive. There have been times when even disability advocates have been concerned about parking fraud. I feel strongly, at this point, that there should be photos on disability permits to dissuade people from "borrowing" permits from elderly or disabled relatives or friends without them being in the car.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 11:34 AM on August 15, 2023

seeing

Another subtle question he asked in the 2018 edition: “Who paid for your boobs?”

The slogan of The Woody Show is “Insensitivity training for a politically correct world,” and it can reasonably be described as a fairly conservative show. (A recurring segment is called “Redneck News.”) Davis said his personal politics lean more on the “independent-slash-libertarian”

juxtaposed with the authors 'humanistic takeaway' moment

at one point a kid—maybe 14 or so—stopped his mom as they were heading toward their car. “Yooooo, are you guys the Cart Narcs?” he asked, thinking that I, too, must have been an agent. “Can we take a selfie? I’ve seen all your videos.”

is a very troubling and also totally unexplored avenue for this article. stunt media like this is somewhat agnostic - it's nice to be kind. but to have it exist as a segment in the midst of an ideology-peddling show feels sinister to me
posted by paimapi at 11:39 AM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

More jobs equals a better world for the working class.

The reductive "more jobs" does not equal a "better world" for the working class.

Well, the US nationally currently has a 3.5% unemployment rate, many better jobs than 'grocery store worker' are unfilled, worse ones than that too, so even if they theoretically got rid of self-checks at every grocery store, it's debatable if there would be people available to do those jobs. Lack of jobs is possibly a local issue, but a national issue, it is not. So if are looking at this as job creation/ job protection, it really depends on your location.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:46 AM on August 15, 2023

One of the reasons why the "returning your own shopping cart takes jobs away from people" arguments sits poorly with me is because I've seen similar arguments used to justify all sorts of shitty, antisocial behaviour like littering. "Who cares? Someone gets paid to pick that up, so I'm doing them a favour, right?"
posted by WaylandSmith at 11:47 AM on August 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

Well, the US nationally currently has a 3.5% unemployment rate, many better jobs than 'grocery store worker' are unfilled, worse ones than that too, so even if they theoretically got rid of self-checks at every grocery store, it's debatable if there would be people available to do those jobs. Lack of jobs is possibly a local issue, but a national issue, it is not. So if are looking at this as job creation/ job protection, it really depends on your location.

I'm not really sure what this has to do with anything.

The vagaries of a capitalist employment market have no bearing on what factors would make up a better world for the working class (i.e., everyone without capital), unless you think that people need to be "fulfilled" by wage labor and also in which the quality of said wage labor is immaterial to said fulfillment (none of which I believe.)
posted by rhymedirective at 12:06 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

This thread leads me to realize that it's been probably ten years since I last used a shopping cart. The plastic baskets by the doors work great and if you're walking or riding a bike to the store represent a reasonable load to schlepp home anyway. Of course I have the privelege of living in a European metro area with several stores in walking distance, and when I do drive to a store it's usually because I'm en route somewhere and it never occurs to me to borrow one.
The last time I distinctly remember borrowing a cart was when my daughter was an infant (she's learning to drive now) and I needed ice for a party, but ice wasn't available at the grocery. So I borrowed a cart and put her in the child seat and walked over a kilometer and over a motorway to the fish auction place where I knew a guy who could hook me up.
posted by St. Oops at 12:11 PM on August 15, 2023

(I should have prefaced my comment by noting that I do approximately 90% of the grocery shopping for the family and typically visit a grocery store nearly every day.)
posted by St. Oops at 12:25 PM on August 15, 2023

capitalist employment market have no bearing on what factors would make up a better world for the working class

Actually it does, in that there need to be people who need jobs to do jobs. You can't just make up jobs that most assuredly wouldn't pay well (like cart-returner person) and expect the market to provide that job. It's exactly the same as the anti-social littering example above. We all have to pick up litter because no-one is going to hire a bunch of somebodys to go around picking up litter everywhere.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:27 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I shop at a pretty small 2-location discount/grocery liquidator store which doesn't have any cart corrals and has probably 15 carts total, of 4-5 different kinds. The area has a dense population of homeless who will take and use the carts for their own purposes if left out for long. So I push the cart all the way inside the store.

When I shop at the big boys, I put my cart in a corral or in the store as I walk out (if my groceries aren't too heavy to carry) because interlocking carts go kachunk and collapse in a satisfying way.

Yes I'm doing volunteer work for a for-profit. I'm also shopping there paying their cost and whatever markup they decide. I can't always buy perfectly virtuous groceries either. I try to do all of my shopping at the liquidator where most of the food would become trash in a few weeks. Otherwise I try to shop at a chain that is either union or employee owned.
posted by shenkerism at 12:37 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Actually it does, in that there need to be people who need jobs to do jobs. You can't just make up jobs that most assuredly wouldn't pay well (like cart-returner person) and expect the market to provide that job. It's exactly the same as the anti-social littering example above. We all have to pick up litter because no-one is going to hire a bunch of somebodys to go around picking up litter everywhere.

I don't expect the market to do anything. We seem to be coming at this from two completely different worldviews and that's fine.
posted by rhymedirective at 12:37 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

> according to this one-eyed Republican Joe Rogan's talking to yt , that's okay as long as you feel bad about it.

There are many things wrong with Crenshaw, but his lack of an eye is not one of them (I, too, have a disability that requires me to wear an eyepatch and I hope it doesn't reduce my credibility in people's view, but experience tells me that it does. And that sucks.)
posted by nixxon at 12:43 PM on August 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

so i'm thinking about what it is about this guy that gets under my skin, and i kept thinking "i'll know what it is about him if i just keep reading," and i got to that bit where he describes himself as a "libertarian" and an "independent" and i was like oh god he's that stereotype he's the libertarian dude he's the worst type of gen-xer.

which like obviously that's part of it but it wasn't until just a few minutes ago that i put my finger on what's actually so fuckin' obnoxious about him, because it is more than just him being an "libertarian-leaning independent" or whatever and it is so much worse than that:

he's a libertarian who cosplays as a cop.

a libertarian. who cosplays. as a cop. this is totally a category of dude — but most of them don't beclown themselves by actually doing it, like actually actually doing it. even so it is a category of dude and they are literally the worst thing in the history of everybody and i hate them.

and like i super double hate this guy. think about the combination of beliefs and attitudes and essential, like, fuckin' shamelessness of a person who a: is a dude b: who says he's a libertarian c: who likes cops so much that d: he cosplays as a fake mall cop, and who d: makes a living by hassling people about shopping carts while cosplaying as a fake mall cop and then e: posting videos of it on the Internet. just, like, think about all of that. take it in.

i will gladly allow one hundred shopping-cart-adorned gusts to strike my car and every car i may ever drive and somehow retroactively every car i have ever driven if in exchange i can get to not think about him ever again. end pronouncement.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:06 PM on August 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

I could care less about carts getting returned but it would be very difficult. Now, if you went out and confronted or better yet gave a ticket to people who jet up to the front of and then aggressively cut into a long line of stoic drivers who are patiently lined up to get on the freeway I would be happy.
posted by Pembquist at 1:12 PM on August 15, 2023

If you don’t return carts so that workers can keep their jobs, do you dump your garbage in the street? Asking for a friend……
posted by Ideefixe at 1:15 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

> Now, if you went out and confronted or better yet gave a ticket to people who jet up to the front of and then aggressively cut into a long line of stoic drivers who are patiently lined up to get on the freeway I would be happy.

you are standing on the precipice of a derail that involves a discussion of fluid dynamics that then skips over to a web 0.5 gray-background-blue-links page from a boeing engineer about figuring out how there's two bottlenecks in the freeway going through seattle where (barring accidents) slowdowns always start, and that he could evaporate traffic jams around him by getting into the lane that's most often merged through and then leaving like 30 car lengths between him and the person in front of him, falling farther and farther back as people merged into his lane. because what causes traffic jams (barring accidents) is people having to slow down to merge.

i'm not brave enough to do it as aggressively as circa-1995 boeing engineer says he did, but when i'm driving and someone wants to merge into my lane, i do my damnedest to help them do it as quickly as possible. if we try to compete with each other for lane space everyone loses, if we avoid competing with each other for lane space everyone wins.

so next time someone wants to merge in front of you you should let them merge in front of you instead of trying to cause a traffic jam for no reason. think of it as a game: every time someone merges in front of you, give yourself a point. your goal is to maximize your score.

in conclusion fuck this cart narc guy he's the fuckin' worst
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:21 PM on August 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

Letting people merge in front of you gives you car karma points that pay out in green lights.
posted by joannemerriam at 1:26 PM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

This whole thing is a perfect demonstration of the principle that the lower the stakes, the higher the dudgeon.

The car parks around Aldi stores are almost completely free of loose carts. This demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that people do in fact assign a value of less than a dollar to any "principle" they might offer as an excuse for dumping their goddamn shopping cart whereverthefuck instead of leaving it in the nearest collection bay. And unless there's evidence I'm unaware of that Aldi is patronized by fewer disabled folks or harassed parents than any other source of shopping carts, this calculus would appear to apply just as strongly to those people as it does to anybody else.

The cart narc's essential thesis - that failure to return a cart is just straight-up laziness, and antisocial laziness at that, and that the "reasons" people trot out when called on it are just toddler-grade bullshit excuses and everybody knows it - is therefore demonstrably very close to completely correct.

And yet some people do get utterly enraged about being called on a piece of laziness that they would avoid if not avoiding it cost them a dollar; less than the fee charged for making a cash withdrawal at a retail store ATM. And watching the pettiest and most complacent occupants of an Empire so badly organized that it can neither control gun sales properly nor figure out public health funding get goaded into a self-righteous froth by some fool cosplaying as a member of its hideous police forces can be, in the right mood, captivatingly hilarious. Almost as much fun as earwax extraction videos.

The guy is totally an asshole, and so are the people who react to his absurd "widdly-widdly-woop" approach with all the spurious, entitled fury that only the truly morally bankrupt can muster. I'm just glad I don't live in the same country as either. My condolences to those of you who have to.
posted by flabdablet at 1:28 PM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Cart Narc is a fascist and the whole meme from a couple years back that whether someone returns their shopping cart is a useful metric for a person's ability to self-govern and be a productive member of society is cryptofascist propaganda. I am not lying when I say I believe this is actual international philosophical espionage.

This is my fucking hill and I will die on it. As I have many times already with the masses on Reddit. I wear their downvotes with pride for the couple people I've convinced.

Now to check if my argument has already been elaborated here because, holy heck, I gotta go valet in this weather and *fingers crossed* maybe someone else has discharged my burden.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 1:32 PM on August 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

I love it when other people don't return their carts. Means I can be lazy and add mine to the nascent centipede without making someone retrieve it individually.
posted by tigrrrlily at 1:42 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

If there is an expensive vehicle taking up multiple parking spaces, I try to put my cart wherever I think it will inconvenience the driver the most. Otherwise I put it in the corral; I am lazy enough that I often park next to the corral for just that reason. Especially at Costco. Although I think people who leave their carts strewn about the parking lot are jerks, it is hard to get too worked up about them when people around here can’t even be bothered to move their finger a few inches to use the turn signal when they are driving.
posted by TedW at 1:45 PM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

And unless there's evidence I'm unaware of that Aldi is patronized by fewer disabled folks or harassed parents than any other source of shopping carts, this calculus would appear to apply just as strongly to those people as it does to anybody else.

When the carts contain money, other people will put them back even if you don't, so it isn't necessarily telling you anything about how people with disabilities handle their carts. And if it is telling you anything about how they handle their carts that thing might be 'people with disabilities are much more likely to live in poverty than the non-disabled and thus to them a dollar is not some trifling amount to just be thrown away even if it would cause them pain to get it back.'
posted by jacquilynne at 1:45 PM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

a libertarian. who cosplays. as a cop.

Is this a fascism?. gif

Anyways, gimme an hour or two and I'll have my write up for you.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 1:47 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

so next time someone wants to merge in front of you you should let them merge in front of you instead of trying to cause a traffic jam for no reason. think of it as a game: every time someone merges in front of you, give yourself a point. your goal is to maximize your score.

Only if they use their turn signal.
posted by TedW at 1:50 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

> Only if they use their turn signal.

there's bonus points when you get a merge off of someone who's not signalling or who is otherwise driving bad. and also when you get the bonus a super-deep cool dude voice says "𝕙𝕒𝕫𝕒𝕣𝕕 𝕕𝕠𝕕𝕘𝕖𝕕!" and the screen flashes a little
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:01 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

oh fuck i'm on the freeway and i think i'm shrooming did i accidentally have shrooms am i shrooming and driving oh fuck this is awful fuck fuck fuck
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:04 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

METAFILTER: actual international philosophical espionage
posted by philip-random at 2:35 PM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

This is, essentially, Crank Yankers meets ChangingtheClimate.com and it doesn't improve on either.
posted by jeanmari at 2:56 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’m a cart returner unless there’s someone else with me to entertain with my sense of humor, and two unhoused carts that are closer to me than the corral. In that case, I just park my cart with those two and say aloud “alas, it is the tragedy of the commons.”
posted by aydeejones at 3:31 PM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

1. Ableist bullshit.
2. I’ve had a parking lot security guard chastise for me for returning a cart in Houston because “Nobody does that, they pay employees to do it and it’s too damn hot for you to be doing it.“
3. I had a grocery store employee tell me not to return it because he likes doing it, because it lets him be outside for a while, instead of inside the store.

Of all the horrible things people do in the world, not returning carts is a pretty small thing (especially since, as I pointed out above, there are people whose job it is to do this.) I’m much more concerned about people running red lights, people driving vans and SUVs and trucks and crossover vehicles when they don’t have any real need, people screaming about LGBQT rights but still eating Chick Fil A, people thinking that it’s ok for Dolly Parton to record a song with an anti-trans guy “because it’s Dolly”, and a long list of other things that seem much more evil to me. Being too tired on a Friday night to drag your cart all the way back to the store because you had a stressful week, you have long Covid, and your back hurts and you know there are teenagers being paid to retrieve it does not seem to me like it’s going to bring about the downfall of society.
posted by MexicanYenta at 3:54 PM on August 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

I’ll happily take retroactive donations to cover the costs I incurred in fixing the cart damage to my car from any of you principled cart non-returners. Seriously. Memail me and we’ll connect up for e-transfer if you’re in Canada or PayPal if you’re outside of Canada.
posted by eviemath at 4:13 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Well shopping carts, ok, but what about buggies?
posted by mygothlaundry at 4:30 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

and you know there are teenagers being paid to retrieve it does not seem to me like it’s going to bring about the downfall of society.

Did you tip them?
posted by banshee at 4:47 PM on August 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

A New Zealand Tiktoker posted this great take on the genre.

We're the good guys and we're returning the cart.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:50 PM on August 15, 2023

I don't necessarily understand what motivates some people to become unpaid cart return mods, but I appreciate their service.
posted by otsebyatina at 5:24 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I will pac man carts in my path when returning mine, if the parking lot allows.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:41 PM on August 15, 2023

i declare new thread topic!!

posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:34 AM on August 15 [+] [!]

eponysterical!
posted by LizBoBiz at 6:48 PM on August 15, 2023

I was raised going to the Navy commissary with my mom. Parking took a good 20 minutes. And then there was a line to get in that could take another 20 or 30.

The length of the line was determined by cart availability. There were a limited number and you couldn't go on to shop without one. So EVERYBODY walking up to the line grabbed and returned any cart they could see. No need for cart jockeys at all.

I still tend to take one or two with me as I am heading in from a parking lot.
posted by SLC Mom at 6:59 PM on August 15, 2023

... aside from a few chains like Aldi, American supermarkets have left cart-returning to the honor system. This was probably a mistake.
Aldi stores here use the coin-deposit system ($1 or $2 coin or you can get a token from Aldi that clips to the shopping bags you keep in the car because of course you don't pay for 'reusable' bags every time you buy groceries) and you never see Aldi carts in the car parks of shopping centres. The $1 or $2 seems to have hit the sweet spot of encouraging people to bring the cart back but not quite so much that they'll just grab a Woolworths/Coles trolley from the car park and use that instead. Although there are almost certainly a surprising amount of people that believe it's illegal to use a Woollies trolley in Aldi and vice-versa.

I don't think not returning a shopping cart makes one a bad person, but It's certainly a negative indicator of someone's possible character, if only because shopping carts left unattended are strongly attracted to shiny cars. I don't think less of you just because you don't return your cart, but you probably also walk on the wrong side of a busy footpath and don't pick up your dog's shit. But then, I also think a little less of you if you make part of your living from harassing people not doing something that is, at best, a vague social construct in the first place.
posted by dg at 7:08 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Having been a cart attendant, and then moving up on retail to a leadership position and still having to push carts… I don’t care if you put it back or not. Moving carts is my job and if I can get some sun doing it then even better. That said, I don’t like it when someone puts the cart loose by the intersection of four spots because the risk to other people’s cars is high enough that it gives me anxiety.

Leave your carts wherever you want but just be courteous to others when you do.
posted by JakeEXTREME at 7:15 PM on August 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think it's telling that the A-hole in the video decided that THIS was the behavior that separates good folk from bad. Instead of focusing on relevant things, like who they vote for, how they treat people who are different than themselves, how they treat kids, whether they pay their taxes, if they use public transit, etc.
No, he decided that a person's character is determined by some random act that's a very minor part of a much longer chain of decisions that have an actual impact on society, but he just ignores all that and focuses on one trivial little behavior as if it were massively relevant. I guess it's part of the libertarian ethos to ignore actions that have real social consequences.
It's like worrying if the people on the titanic bothered to say "excuse me" as they pushed little old ladies out of the way to get on the liferafts.
posted by signal at 7:31 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

$1 or $2

The Aldi I go to requires a quarter (of USD). Seems steep. I wonder if Aussies need more encouragement, on average. Or are smaller coins not as common?
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:46 PM on August 15, 2023

I'M GOING TO BEAT HIM WITH THE CART

(I'm a small woman but if I was a big guy I'd absolutely at least make the threat)
posted by kingdead at 7:49 PM on August 15, 2023

... are smaller coins not as common?
Coins (and notes) of any denomination are increasingly uncommon here but smaller-value coins aren't necessarily less common than larger as far as I know. It's possible people are more likely to carry $1 and $2 coins just because you can't really buy anything with less than $1 these days. I noticed the discrepancy in the value of coins used to get a cart here vs the US and just figured it's a psychological trick in terms of the value that would be high enough to piss people off vs what they would be willing to leave behind to avoid taking the cart back. I assumed that value was different between the two countries.

Aldi sells a reusable token you can use for the trolleys for 99c but, if you go into the store and tell them you don't have any cash and need a trolley, they'll usually just give you one.
posted by dg at 8:30 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

No, he decided that a person's character is determined by some random act that's a very minor part of a much longer chain of decisions that have an actual impact on society, but he just ignores all that and focuses on one trivial little behavior as if it were massively relevant.

Hardly a new idea:

to my mind the real greatness of a nation, its true civilization, is measured by the extent of this land of Obedience to the Unenforceable. It measures the extent to which the nation trusts its citizens, and its existence and area testify to the way they behave in response to that trust.

posted by pwnguin at 10:01 PM on August 15, 2023

I don't think less of you just because you don't return your cart, but you probably also walk on the wrong side of a busy footpath and don't pick up your dog's shit.

Cool. Today I learned my spinal damage makes me a bad person.
posted by cmyk at 2:40 AM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think there is a much more banal explanation Re the denomination of coins required. The mechanism for inserting the coin (a sliding tray or a thingy with a slot) is i think globally the same, three or four models available (based on googling pictures of coin operated carts). They are designed so that whatever coin is widely available in a country will fit.
I assume it is a quarter in the US because that is a common coin and one US Dollar coins are not a thing used widely? (Do they even exist, cant remember).
posted by 15L06 at 2:52 AM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Possibly of interest to the spinally damaged
posted by flabdablet at 3:11 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the video, and if like me you are hesitant to open it because of the link text "for the spinally damaged" (which is seriously weird because it contains information useful to anyone faced with locked Shopping cart without a coin), it simply shows how to unlock a cart by using your housekeys.
posted by 15L06 at 3:52 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here again the actually useful link to how to unlock supermarket trolleys using your housekeys
posted by 15L06 at 3:57 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Bad person" seems too loaded and vague a term. I'd rather suggest that routinely abandoning shopping carts, leaving dog shit on the sidewalk, etc. is justifiably seen as antisocial behavior, and that having spinal damage doesn't necessarily preclude being antisocial.

Anti social is really loaded as well, as it assumes that everyone has a choice in the matter. Some people pay much more (in effort, pain energy) than others, some more than they can afford.

You can't tell from the outside how much that effort costs another person. If you can't imagine the cost is significant, that just means your ability to know what another person experiences is limited.

Not sure why leaving dog shit on the sidewalk has suddenly become part of the equation.
posted by Zumbador at 4:03 AM on August 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

The dog shit leavings were mentioned just up the thread a bit, and was quoted in the comment that mine was in response to.

I don't understand this wild swing to the opposite end where it's assumed that anything but a vanishingly small minority of motivations for antisocial behavior result from an absence of choice, and that the appropriate response is to assume that it simply can't be helped.
posted by otsebyatina at 4:12 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

The whole point of the "Cart return" heuristic is that there is no judgement of any kind to not returning your cart.

You gain nothing by returning it. If suddenly there is a cost to not returning it (as there now is, here) then you have 100% undermined the heuristic. It is no longer a pure assessment of social character. Now it is nothing.

The Cart Narc actually systemically reduces the probability and moral value of selflessly returning the cart because you ought.
But more than that it highlights the notion that it can only work as a judgement if it is an act free of judgement. It's value as a heuristic for judgement is solely contingent on that value not existing. It is a paradoxical moral judgement. It can only exist if it does not exist.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:31 AM on August 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

I don't understand this wild swing to the opposite end where it's assumed that anything but a vanishingly small minority of motivations for antisocial behavior result from an absence of choice, and that the appropriate response is to assume that it simply can't be helped.

The lower the stakes, the higher the dudgeon.

You gain nothing by returning it.

Assuming your mental model of how community works is predicated on the kind of self-serving "rationality" that underpins game theory, thereby making defection the "rational" response to the Prisoner's Dilemma, then that is so.

If instead you understand that by and large we're all in the same boat and that therefore contributing to benign norms for community behaviour confers a benefit on everybody - in other words, if you aspire to superrationality - then doing nice things for other people because they're nice things to do is an obvious win.

To outside observers the US frequently demonstrates that its culture is far from superrational along pretty much every conceivable axis, and the eagerness of so many to proffer "principled" excuses for the non-return of shopping carts in this very thread is yet another example. This might well explain why it's a superpower.

Also, to some outside observers the sheer ease of getting a rise out of an American by having a tiny dig at American norms is hilarious beyond all reason. I'm certainly in that bucket, so I'm undoubtedly a Bad Person even though my personal shopping cart return rate is well over 200%.
posted by flabdablet at 5:35 AM on August 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

US Dollar coins are not a thing used widely? (Do they even exist, cant remember).

"Silver" dollars (and half-dollars) are still available, although I've received one as change maybe once or twice in my life. They're minted as collectibles now. Same with the two-dollar bill.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:43 AM on August 16, 2023

The Cart Narc actually systemically reduces the probability and moral value of selflessly returning the cart because you ought.

For who? He mainly does this in Cali. He has a lot of views on YouTube probably but who actually watches him? How many people have ever heard of him?

People who watch him were likely already irritated by people who don't put their carts away, or already interested in confronting-mundane-"evildoers" content, or already liked his character from the show he's in.

The Cart Narc only affects one's morals as much as one lets him.

I think we've gone superhyperbolic and are giving him way too much credit honestly.
posted by Baethan at 5:46 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

9. Customers who bring up their cart and an additional cart???? What planet dropped them off, because I'm moving there.

Welcome to East Gippsland. We also have beaches.
posted by flabdablet at 6:49 AM on August 16, 2023

Not sure why leaving dog shit on the sidewalk has suddenly become part of the equation.

There's a guy in my neighbourhood (I live near a small park) who gets around in an electric wheelchair, followed by his two unleashed dogs, who are absolute darlings, very obedient. Except they are dogs. They do need to take a shit every now and then, and the park is often the spot for them. He (their owner) does not clean up after them. In fact, I notice he's pretty good at not even noticing it (ie: looks the other way).

Does this bother me? Not really. I honestly don't know how he'd do the cleanup.

Should this guy just not not have dogs? Some would argue that. I wouldn't. They obviously mean a lot to him and he to them. Contrary to (some) popular belief, there are worse sins than not cleaning up after your dogs. Sometimes everyday life is just complex. Sometimes, I think the real sin is assuming otherwise ...
posted by philip-random at 7:55 AM on August 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Metafilter: your disability doesn’t excuse you from doing things you’re not actually physically capable of, and yes I will judge you.
posted by MexicanYenta at 10:18 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

So, you can get pooper scoopers on handles, for those who can’t bend over easily or without pain.
posted by eviemath at 10:21 AM on August 16, 2023

I love this guy, his content, the energy he brings out in people, spotting the cart-leavers in comments, and seeing the fallout of it all.

Disability is a new one for me, able to bring cart to car with groceries, but returning empty is too much, I'll have to keep that in mind when judging strangers' cart habits next time I go to the grocery store.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:30 AM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

why judge them at all?
posted by philip-random at 10:46 AM on August 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Disability is a new one for me, able to bring cart to car with groceries, but returning empty is too much,

So, what one learns when living with disability is that everything has a cost. Some things are worth the cost, for example, getting a full grocery cart to your car = not going hungry. Returning the cart = not being judged by total strangers. One of those is a bit easier to live with than the other.

Of course, we could just give one another a bit of grace and not judge at all? Totally possible.
posted by Zumbador at 11:01 AM on August 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Disability is a new one for me, able to bring cart to car with groceries, but returning empty is too much, I'll have to keep that in mind when judging strangers' cart habits next time I go to the grocery store.

It's a fairly common mindset to think of disability as a binary. Someone can hear or can't hear. Someone can walk or can't walk. Someone has seizures regularly or never has a seizure. Someone has an arm or doesn't have an arm.

But lots of disabilities aren't really like that. You can be mostly but not entirely deaf. You have some use of your arm, but a serious tremor. You can be able to walk for a short time or stand up out of your chair with support but not walk unaided. You can have rare seizures but still need a service dog to alert you to them when they are going to happen.

It's especially likely to be true less visible disabilities like chronic fatigue, chronic pain, heart-related conditions, balance problems, etc. People with those disabilities may have good days or bad days. They may also have a certain well of energy or pain tolerance to draw on, and it can be higher on days when they've recently rested and lower at times when they've already had a heavy day.

And those kinds of disabilities can mean that you might be able to do something occasionally or for a short time or as many times as you absolutely need to but it will hurt more each time. And for people in those situations, the calculus on whether taking the cart back is worth it or not may be more complicated than any of us could guess.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:19 AM on August 16, 2023 [9 favorites]

I suspect we’re not in a good position here on an online forum to debate the relative costs of damages from stray carts (in my case: between $100 and $200 in 2008 Canadian dollars plus several hours of my time, and some distress and added stress when I was just starting a new job, also sorting out immigration details, having recently moved to a new location, etc.), cost in spoons of bringing a cart to a corral if they weren’t able to park adjacent to one for folks with disabilities, or cost in social stress and dealing with ableist discrimination in asking for walk-out service at the checkout so that a store employee will deal with the cart return for folks with less visible disabilities - and also that it would be a much better use of our time to discuss possible solutions that meet everyone’s needs rather than focusing on a competition between needs. But it does kind of feel like to me that the folks pointing out that disability status might impact cart return aren’t acknowledging that there can also be a real cost to others in not leaving a cart somewhere where it is safe from running off. (Which is why I keep bringing it up.) I’m happy to acknowledge that the guy in the fpp links is not addressing either issue nor providing a public good. Our discussion has broadened beyond his specific reasons for harassing people who don’t corral or return their carts, though.

Side note: I’m still accepting offers of retroactive compensation for my car’s cart-derived damages from the folks upthread who claim they leave their carts un-corralled on principle. Haven’t gotten any MeMails about that yet.
posted by eviemath at 11:41 AM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

the calculus on whether taking the cart back is worth it or not may be more complicated than any of us could guess.

Even so, it's pretty amazing how many people allege being disabled in a way that would preclude pushing an empty shopping cart fifty yards to a collection bay but somehow doesn't discourage them from getting repeatedly in and out of their cars while screaming at and offering physical violence to an irritatingly faux-folksy YouTuber.
posted by flabdablet at 11:51 AM on August 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

I've only ever seen cars dinged by carts...maybe a tail light broken. I didn't know some could cause hundreds of dollars of necessary repairs, maybe there are heftier ones than I'm used to. It sucks if that happens to your car, and I sympathize, cars are too expensive by far).

For me, it's not worth the emotional energy to ascribe laziness or rudeness to someone when I can devils advocate that they are disabled or distracted or did it ONLY TODAY the only time in their life they will ever do the inconveniencing thing. It's a nicer way to live than assuming everyone you see doing THING is a jerk. Also, people are not usually doing anything AT you, if you know what I mean. We're all our own little monkeys thinking about too much.

(I gained more patience after the pandemic. I think any time you can limit your exposure to the public, for me, less commuting by train, makes you stronger against perceived slights)
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:06 PM on August 16, 2023

To clarify, I was not being facetious before. I had not previously considered that scenario and it warrants apropriate consideration. To bring groceries to a vehicle is necessary for the purposes of having food at one's home, to return a cart is an optional consideration for property damage, convenience of other consumers, and labourers. One is more important than the other.

why judge them at all?

Seems like an automatic processing when observing any other being in your vicinity? Pretty low stakes especially when you usually never interact with most people you see.
posted by GoblinHoney at 12:10 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

tiny frying pan, I think you're underestimating how much it costs to fix cars. Even paint touchups can run into the hundreds of dollars, and replacing body panels - not to mention the actual light assemblies! - is absurdly expensive.
posted by sagc at 12:18 PM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

LOL omg I am not underestimating such a thing, I'm going through car repairs right now. Like, this very minute, today.

I do think there is a difference in cosmetic damage vs something that actually needs to be fixed and I was imagining, damn, the former, I've never experienced it. Hence my comment about maybe there being heftier carts in different areas, bigger than I'm used to.
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:28 PM on August 16, 2023

how many discussions in MeFi are anything but a series of judgments? that is what people do

if there are some pure-hearted individuals out there who float through life without making judgment calls on others, I suspect they are not visiting this space
posted by elkevelvet at 12:32 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

(I meant the latter not former, mixed those up....that a cart smashing into a car in a parking lot causing necessary hundreds in repairs was unfamiliar to me in this area)
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:41 PM on August 16, 2023

It's not about being pure hearted though?

I try to root out my racism when I realise I'm being racist. Same for abelism. Doesn't make me better than anyone else, it's just a thing one does if you don't want to hurt people.
posted by Zumbador at 12:41 PM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you return shopping carts but vote for Trump, you are not a worthy individual. It's nice to return carts. They're expensive, if you don't return it, an employee will recover it, but it's hard to fill those jobs right now, cause it's a crappy job. I think the really horrible social crime is littering. or being generally unkind to people. There are plenty of ways to measure how shitty people are.

You know 1 great thing early Boomers enjoyed? A bagger would bag your groceries, then bring them to you car.
posted by theora55 at 12:48 PM on August 16, 2023

It's not about being pure hearted though?

I'm sorry Zumbador, and you are correct in the sense that this has nothing to do with purity. I'm not sure the act of judging is entirely a negative thing, in that it's very human to judge. This is a derail and I'm happy to leave people to discuss carts and ableism, as it's a good discussion.
posted by elkevelvet at 12:57 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Awareness of ableism, and a sincere desire to recognize and compensate for one's own, is not a value that conflicts with holding the kind of barefaced liar who demands consideration for disabilities they don't have in contempt.

Anybody screaming at some guy about how their migraines render them unable to push an empty cart fifty yards is kind of giving the game away.
posted by flabdablet at 1:15 PM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

theora55, absolutely voting for Trump is worse. But you are (again) missing one of the potential consequences to others of leaving shopping carts where they can be blown by wind or bushes accidentally by vehicles and run off and hit cars or people. Most instances of littering don’t have quite the same potential for property or mmm damage or injury, though I would agree that their impact on the aesthetic pleasantness of our shared environment is worse.
posted by eviemath at 1:17 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure the act of judging is entirely a negative thing, in that it's very human to judge. This is a derail and

I don't know that it's a derail. I think the problem of judgment is at the heart of the whole cart-narc situation. It's right there in lead line of the post:

Sebastian Davis, who’s built an empire of weaponized righteousness

I've certainly learned the hard way over time that judging people generally doesn't get me anywhere helpful. I can be dismayed at something they did and say as much. But judgment, to me, goes deeper. It's positioning myself as somehow superior to them. Which may well be the case in many a circumstance, but how do I know this without truly knowing them, their heart, their intention, all the shitty things that have happened to them since they were two years old that have come to form the person that chose to do the annoying thing did? All things that a judge might consider in court ...

I recently got stuck living with someone who was quick to judge people. They did have a good sense of social justice, of good vs bad, right vs wrong. But they weren't right all the time. And more to the point, they weren't perfect themselves. Which led to numerous living-in-a-glass-house situations. It was extremely painful after a while, effectively watching them burn themselves down in a cleansing fire of self-righteousness.

"Judge not lest ye be judged," Jesus is alleged to have said. I think he was on to something.
posted by philip-random at 1:21 PM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Also GROCERY STORES STILL OFFER CARRY-OUT SERVICE. That is not just a thing that Boomers enjoyed, though now you have to specifically request it at check-out.
posted by eviemath at 1:22 PM on August 16, 2023

(bushes -> pushed in my second-to-last comment. Missed the edit window.)
posted by eviemath at 1:24 PM on August 16, 2023

You know 1 great thing early Boomers enjoyed? A bagger would bag your groceries, then bring them to you car.

Publix grocery stores still offer this to everyone, though I rarely take them up on it. (Usually I park as near as I can to a cart corral, unload my groceries and return my own cart.) It was really nice to have when I was under a lifting restriction after surgery.
posted by Daily Alice at 2:48 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Ethics of Returning a Shopping Cart Dramatized Over a Variety of Challenging Terrains
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:49 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

A bagger would bag your groceries, then bring them to you car.

Dude, I can't even get a bagger at the grocery stores. Literally there is one grocery store out of town I sometimes stop at after visiting the parental figures and that's the only one that ever has enough staff to provide a bagger. Where I live, fuhgettaboutit, I'm frantically trying to bag my own shit ASAP while the cashier's pushing someone else's stuff into my pile still. They have like, two people at ten cashier stations and the line to self-purchase is super long.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:52 PM on August 16, 2023

(ginormous hand waving)

Nope. Don’t be a d***. Put the carts back.
posted by Galvanic at 3:25 PM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

I know not everybody here is American, but this thread is sooooo American.
posted by signal at 3:49 PM on August 16, 2023 [7 favorites]

In my judgy comment, I ignored the possibility that someone may not be able to return a shopping cart for legitimate reasons such as disability, and for that I apologise to anyone affected in this way.

A bagger would bag your groceries, then bring them to you car.
This was my first job, while I was still in school. Yet another opportunity to earn money that has been taken away from school-age people.
posted by dg at 4:25 PM on August 16, 2023

I know not everybody here is American, but this thread is sooooo American.

I can't help think that, and I'm an American. Perhaps even more specifically, it's very suburban American. It does lead me to wonder what percentage of Americans drive to get groceries versus walk or take public transportation.
posted by mollweide at 5:02 PM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

this thread is sooooo American

Thanks!
posted by Galvanic at 6:28 PM on August 16, 2023

Also as an American, the one time I ever stole a shopping cart was when I didn't drive, was circa age 19 or whatever and living independently for the first time, bought too much stuff, and realized I wasn't going to be able to carry it all home. Stealing a shopping cart is a goddamned pain in the ass (and that was even before they put in anti-theft stuff) to drive even down a sidewalk.

Another fun shopping cart story: at some point my grandfather stole a shopping cart and it ended up in a storage unit for at least 20 years. My mom was very insistent on disposing of the complete useless, broken junk in it The Right Way, which took MONTHS and even involved moving some of the shit into a smaller storage unit for a few more months, and at one point she tried to return a shopping cart to a store that was long since out of business, by rolling it ACROSS TRAIN TRACKS. Had I known this was going on, I would have raised holy hell.

There was also the time when a random stolen shopping cart was floating around my apartment complex, along with this ratty old truck that was abandoned and sitting around in a good parking space for weeks, acquiring cobwebs, and annoying my mother when she was in town. At some point a family friend was talked into throwing the stolen shopping cart into the back of the truck, just for kicks. That abandoned truck was immediately moved and the shopping cart thrown out of it after that.

For those of you wondering where Teh Crazy comes in my gene pool, look no further!
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:42 PM on August 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

Shopping carts are those things I walk past when I get off my bicycle and go into the store to get stuff. On the rare occasions I am involved in driving to a store and using a cart I will usually leave it somewhere unlikely to go rolling away. A corral if it’s close enough, sure.

I used to have a grocery store job and I loved being on cart duty. I could take my sweet time getting the carts. I had fun bringing a bunch of them to a staging point from far flung corners of the parking lot and arranging them in ways that suggested narratives like “one cart is being judged by the rest”. And I didn’t have to talk to a single damn person.

This guy is an asshole Trumpie who gets off on cosplaying as a cop over an absurdly trivial matter and is quite possibly going to die when someone runs him over. Hopefully they will have the sense to grab his phone and drop it into a river afterwards, and the luck to not be caught on a security camera.
posted by egypturnash at 6:45 PM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Mr. eirias treats stray carts left by others as an opportunity to do something good for the world. Same with litter. I can certainly get my judgment on when problems are larger, I'm no saint, but honestly, with something this small, instead of bitching on the internet, whether behind a camera or not, isn't it better to just pitch in?
posted by eirias at 7:36 PM on August 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

I am partially disabled but don't have the tag, I try to return carts to the corral when I go in for groceries, and gosh this discussion means so much less to me now that my favorite grocery store has, in addition to its half-block shop, a half-block warehouse attached to the shop for curbside grocery pickup. /suburban American AF and I know it
posted by gentlyepigrams at 8:40 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

For the record, I'm suburban as fuck. I live in a former streetcar suburb that's technically a small town but is surrounded by a mix of developments, farm, and forest. I have a supermarket that I can walk to and often do, but at least once a week I drive to one further away because it's so much cheaper it pays for the gas and them some to get what I need there. I always put my cart away.
posted by mollweide at 8:53 PM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Cart Narc is a fascist. The cart test is cryptofascist propaganda. Anti-social ordinances are fascists tool. And anyone who supports either is straight-up cryptofascist, at best. Examine your privileges
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 9:30 PM on August 16, 2023

That right there is some quality dudgeon.
posted by flabdablet at 10:29 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

My mother is a public scold. I spent no small portion of my childhood wanting to melt and die as she shouted “Shame! Shame on you!” at total strangers for minor social indiscretions. I can barely even see, hear or type the word shame without having a little shudder. I usually return my cart, but this guy can go fuck himself.
posted by Devils Rancher at 11:27 PM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Is it still cryptofascist to want those who, out of sheer laziness, fail to return the cart feel some measure of shame? There is no ordinance penalizing them otherwise, just my secret wish that they be better (uh oh, "be best"?).

I can see how my desire for stronger enforcement of laws against setting off obnoxiously loud fireworks at all hours of the night all summer long probably brands me a cryptofascist, but I promise to do my level best to not go full maga over it.
posted by otsebyatina at 12:29 AM on August 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I will believe that this is about the tragedy of the commons and making things safer and not just having an excuse to judge people when people start masking in shops again so it’s safe for me to shop and they’re not exposing workers to illness for doing their job. That’s a legitimately easy, low stakes thing to do that everyone has decided is absolutely fine to abandon. So no, I don’t believe in the moralistic arguments about shopping carts because it turns out that there’s a much more meaningful thing people could be doing and are choosing not to.
posted by Bottlecap at 4:16 AM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Before joint replacement surgery, I regularly used shopping carts as walkers. Unable to put weight on one leg, I could lean heavily on the cart. It was still agony but I could get groceries without drawing too much attention.

Returning the cart was always challenging since after doing so I no longer had one to lean on. My cane could only do so much. So I’d usually leave the cart next to the handicapped parking space, hoping someone similarly afflicted might use it.

Now that I can, I am conscientious about returning carts. But I would never shame another for failing to do so. Frailties can be invisible.
posted by kinnakeet at 5:34 AM on August 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

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