9 ms·

I assume it's generally unbecoming to reference 4chan posts for an academic but surprised the Shopping Cart theory didn't get a mention given how close it was t

• GenerocUsername 10mo ago
  I live by this. It is one of the least controversial 4chan takes. There is nothing wrong with citing 4chans shopping cart theory. It is truly a marker of good vs bad people as far as it comes to participating in a high trust society.
  • hackthemack 10mo ago
    I worked at a grocery store for a while in my teens and early twenties. It is really a surprise to me that this has become an internet topic and even more surprising how strongly people feel like it is a litmus test for good vs bad. I just do not think it is a good litmus test. People are busy, some people have kids. Who is really being inconvenienced? One thing I want to point out is that everyone I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts. The employees saw it as a mini-break from the drudgery of the day. From having to go get carts many times, I will say, that if someone leaves their cart in a parking spot... well that is bad behavior. But if they just push it into the grass, or out of the way, who cares if it is tucked away there, or tucked away at cart corral. Someone has to go out and get the carts anyway, and it broke up the day, got you outside.
    • iamnothere 10mo ago
      Speaking of memes, you just did one: > Who is really being inconvenienced? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/smugjak-but-how-does-this-affect-you-personally https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/smugjak-but-how-does-this-aff...
    • arwhatever 10mo ago
      Grass might hold the cart in place, but most abandoned carts get dropped off in places where the wind can catch them and blow them into cars.
      • hackthemack 10mo ago
        Fair point. I did not usually see a free roaming cart though. Maybe times have changed. Usually, people would prop them up against a curb, or ditch them into a grassy spot, or they would put them by a low spot in the parking lot next to a drain, or put them next to a column on the sidewalk. Just my anecdotal experience, it seemed like people would put their cart back if there was a cart corral in the center of every parking row.
        • bombcar 10mo ago
          Walmarts around me seem to have a corral every ten or so cars, hordes of them. I still encounter strays and that’s with them seeming having a dedicated cart cowboy (with his little train). I once calculated the number of carts Walmart has worldwide and it was mind-boggling.
    • redwall_hp 10mo ago
      Back when I worked in retail, my car was dented multiple times from people not putting carts in the designated areas. Sometimes you can't park without getting out of the car to clean up after other people, because carts are littering the parking spaces. (Including being pushed from adjacent spots into handicap spaces.) I've parked near corrals and had people half-ass push them next to it, effectively double parking me until I removed several carts. I've had to jump out of the way of carts being whipped down an aisle by a strong wind in a storm. Nobody's talking about bringing carts back to the building, but doing the bare minimum of putting them in the corrals. Failing to do so is saying you value your minor convenience over other peoples' time, property and health. Tucking them on a curb is saying you know you're doing a bad thing but don't really care.
  • johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    It's derived from the "how do you treat the waiter" test in first dates, so it's not like this came from nowhere. Your small actions where "it doesn't matter" can have surprising revelations on your overall disposition in life. e.g., if you're reaction to being asked about a shopping cart is violence, that says a lot about how you treat many confrontations in your life.
    • JohnBooty 10mo ago
      I think they test distinct things. Being nice to a waiter doesn't require additional work. Also, being a jerk to the waiter hurts another human being directly and is a strategic error because it is more likely to cause them to spit in your food than it is to get you better service. In contrast, leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly. It just makes a supermarket run slightly less efficiently. This could theoretically raise prices by increasing labor requirements, but it's not a linear relationship. Failing to return a cart would only increase prices if enough people do it to cross the threshold at which they would need to have an additional cart-collecting employee. It's still an anti-social behavior, but the impact is more nebulous.
      • worthless-trash 10mo ago
        > leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly. Found a cart leaver. :)
        • schmookeeg 10mo ago
          You stole their username :D
          • worthless-trash 10mo ago
            Gotta get ahead of the game !
      • 1718627440 10mo ago
  • JohnBooty 10mo ago
    It is truly a marker of good vs bad people as far as it comes to participating in a high trust society. Here's an even better test, if you ask me. Do you ever grab one of those "stranded" shopping carts on the way in to the store? A lot of societal issues can't be cured merely by doing the right thing ourselves. Littering can't be solved merely by not littering - somebody has to pick up litter. (A lot of litter is the result of wind blowing over trashcans and such, so even in a society where nobody intentionally litters, there will be litter) Murder can't be solved merely by not murdering people - if you witness a murder, you need to do something about it, not just think "well, at least I don't murder people" and continue with your day. Shopping cart logistics are obviously many orders of magnitude less serious than murder, but I think it's a similar class of problem/solution.
    • bombcar 10mo ago
      I try to grab an outside shopping cart to leave the world slightly less chaotic than when I entered; which is all we can do in life, perhaps. But now and then I find one of the electric ride-a-carts and that’s the reward for all my work; riding the scootypuff jr in to the glorious chords of … the Walmart theme song.
      • maest 10mo ago
        > I try to grab an outside shopping cart to leave the world slightly less chaotic than when I entered; which is all we can do in life, perhaps I lived in several European countries for many years. I then moved to the US a few years ago. The US strikes me as a less civilised country, in the sense that people, on average don't return the shopping cart. In the first year after I moved, I kept returning the shopping cart, but, after seeing many others not do it, I stopped. I stopped even though I agree it is the right thing to do because I felt like a fool every time I did it. Other people decided their time is too important to return the cart, so why should I be the sucker who does it? This isn't the only example of uncivilised behaviour I've noticed in the US. Here are other examples: bypassing a long queue of cars only to merge into the lane at the last possible second, skipping red lights if no cars are around, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and forcing other to walk around me, not saying "you're welcome", not giving up my seat on public transportation to e.g. old people, littering. Every time I see someone break these markers of civilised society, makes me less likely to abide by them next time.
• waitwot 10mo ago
  [dead]
• ranger_danger 10mo ago
  It sounds like a good test in theory but I would say it's actually more nuanced than that. In my experience, there are certainly reasons that returning the cart might be difficult or impossible (handicap, small children etc.). If you speak to employees about it, I have been told that they often actually like going outside to get the carts, so to me this is not only increased convenience for me personally, but desired by the employees also as they get a "break" from the chaos inside the store.
  • stronglikedan 10mo ago
    > if you speak to employees about it, I have been told that they often actually like going outside to get the carts This has been my experience as well, but people will always blindly insist the opposite just to "win" the shopping cart argument.
    • HDThoreaun 10mo ago
      The employees arent there to have fun. When customers create work for the store they need to spend more on wages and prices go up. The shopping cart theory isnt about the employees, its about making the whole system a little bit worse for everyone else.
  • johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    >I have been told that they often actually like going outside to get the carts They are getting the carts either way. No one is saying to return all carts to the store. There are several partking lot racks for a reason.
    • 1718627440 10mo ago
      It seems to be different in the USA, but here they wouldn't. If somebody would abandon a shopping cart, it would stay there indefinitely until somebody returns it. I mean the employee might do it after work, on there way home, but also only for the same reason any other random person would do it.
  • 10mo ago
• abetusk 10mo ago
  Interesting theory. Here's my counter theory: People's moral righteousness on whether they think a person can be judged by a morally neutral and inconsequential action sheds light on their true moral character. Especially so if the judged action is insignificant but socially frowned on. I know this is all in half-jest but the article and discussion seem pretty mean-spirited to me.
  • johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    >People's moral righteousness on whether they think a person can be judged by a morally neutral and inconsequential action sheds light on their true moral character. You call it moral righteousness. I call it emotional intelligence. You realize as you grow up that your small actions shape and reflect your larger self. And you can see it in others too. We call it "work ethic" in white collar jobs, and I'm sure you wouldn't defend someone who's otherwise an excellent programmer submitting sloppy reports, having inconsistent time estimates, or simply making snarky PR's. It's a shame we don't value it when it's not about maximizing shareholder value.
• cedws 10mo ago
  My completely unqualified opinion is that this kind of behaviour is linked directly to intellectual ability. Returning the cart requires self-discipline but also implies a thought process around upholding and creating social order. Even fear of shame implies a desire to uphold social standing with others. Whereas not returning the cart can only be explained in two ways: a thought process that says ‘not my problem’ (selfish, disorderly, bad for society) or no thought process at all, like an animal with no higher order thinking.
  • eesmith 10mo ago
    I strongly doubt it is related to intellectual ability but cultural expectations. Some years back someone did a study about which country's US diplomats at the UN had the highest number of NYC parking tickets. Diplomats don't need to pay parking fines due to immunity. This is very similar to returning shopping carts. As I recall, it was clearly correlated with country, which in turn was connected to national corruption rates. Ahh, here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12312/w12312.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12312/w123... > Overall, the basic pattern accords reasonably well with common perceptions of corruption across countries. The worst parking violators – the ten worst are Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria, Mozambique, Albania, Angola, Senegal, and Pakistan – all rank poorly in cross-country corruption rankings. While many of the countries with zero violations accord well with intuition (e.g., the Scandinavian countries, Canada), there are a number of surprises. Some of these are countries with very small missions (e.g., Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic), and a few others have high rates of parking violations but do pay the fines (these are Bahrain, Malaysia, Oman, and Turkey; we return to this issue below). I've read far too many stories of people who don't clean up after themselves at a store or restaurant, justified by "no need - they pay someone to do this" or even "it's a good thing I do this otherwise you wouldn't have a job" to know it's simply intellectual ability.
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    • gxnxcxcx 10mo ago
      > I've read far too many stories of people who don't clean up after themselves at a store or restaurant, justified by "no need - they pay someone to do this" or even "it's a good thing I do this otherwise you wouldn't have a job" to know it's simply intellectual ability. That they can barely articulate a verbalized post-hoc rationalization* for that kind of behavior doesn't prevent them from lacking the minimum processing power needed to achieve awareness of how they are leaving ungreased the machinery of the commons. Into which they will keep being embedded, pulling levers left and right all day long. Even a moderately zero-sum minded sociopath can be aware of the perks of investing a modicum of well-placed niceness; if for no other reason, just to avoid losing social capital. * And probably a memetic one, hardly an original thought.
• kgwxd 10mo ago
  The worst offender is the kind of person that doesn't put it back specifically because they know about this theory. "Don't tread on me!"
  • hat_monger 10mo ago
    Luckily these sorts tend to be so clownish they keep themselves out of power
• xtiansimon 10mo ago
  Are people who return shopping carts also predisposed* to be _good drivers_? * Not considering physical limitations.
• oliwarner 10mo ago
  For an idea about society, that is an incredibly isolated lens on the problem. You gain something if others put their trolleys away. You gain something [fuzzy] knowing you may have helped others. We have these mechanisms of cooperation that some people eschew, that some demand, and coin-release trolleys are the response to what happens when it breaks down. Coincidentally a supermarket near me has recently converted their trolley stock to coin-release. I have three children and increasingly few Pound coins so a result of this is I shop less, and far less impulsively. Good job, Tesco.
• bradlys 10mo ago
  This depends too much. It’s standard at many stores to have someone who goes out and fetches all the carts. They have to do this anyway because of the cart corrals. This sounds like some idea by a European in some tiny parking lot without those. People here have mentioned it only taking 30-60 seconds, which definitely speaks to European centric stuff. A lot of the places I’ve shopped where I’m using a cart, it takes minutes to return. That’s why people aren’t doing it. You spend 1-2 minutes walking to your car. That’s why they leave the cart, it’s an extra 5 minutes round trip. But for an employee who is going to be going around the lot anyway to do this job, it’s no extra added time. This also ignores that people like me will sometimes pickup a cart like this on the way to store if it’s convenient. We also don’t leave them in parking spaces or whatever. We leave them somewhere reasonable.
• dioxis 10mo ago
  You forgot to add: "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."
• sharts 10mo ago
  There cited reasons for not returning carts is often job creation / security. Leaving carts means someone must retrieve.
• noman-land 10mo ago
  There is a third position I've come across, which is also used to justify littering. It's the "they hire people to do this so I don't have to". Sometimes combined with "if I returned my cart/didn't litter those people wouldn't have a job".
  • Tostino 10mo ago
    I'd lump them in with the "bad" members of society group in a heartbeat.