QotD: Shopping Cart
Posted March 11th, 2005 @ 08:27am by Erik J. Barzeski
Question: Here's a situation. You're pushing a cart to your car after shopping at Wal-Mart (or anywhere). Next to you, a woman empties her cart. She's carrying only her purse and has no company, and certainly no children. She pushes her cart in front of her minivan and turns to get into her car. The cart return bin is quite literally 15 feet away Do you say anything?
My Answer: Hell yeah I do. I did. I said "yeah, cuz that's where it goes" under my breath but loud enough that I'm pretty sure she heard it. As she backed out of her space, I made a point of going out of my way to get her cart and mine and returned them both to the designated space, glaring at her for a second or two along the way.
It's just decent behavior, folks. Call me snarky if you want, but I can imagine that it sucks rounding up carts in the winter in Erie, PA, and don't really care to make it any more difficult for the high school and college kids doing the work. The lady's behavior disgusted me.
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Posted 10 Mar 2005 at 10:44pm #
Uggh.. that is pretty disgusting behavior.
As for me, I would not say anything.. but I would push the cart into the return when I am done with mine.
Posted 10 Mar 2005 at 11:20pm #
I'd say something. I hate when people do lazy inconsiderate stuff like that.
The same goes for leaving garbage places for someone else to pick up after you.
The same goes for not flushing the toilet in the men's washroom. Seriously who does this, and why does it seem to happen so often? I don't think I'd say anything if I witnessed someone doing that though. ;).
Posted 11 Mar 2005 at 1:57am #
I think you handled it exactly the way I would have. The biggest problem I have with people not returning the carts is that they usually don't stay where they ditch them. The carts end up getting nudged and get a running start...always into the side of my car. Very frustrating when it could have been avoided.
Posted 11 Mar 2005 at 2:02am #
Where I am, carts require a Euro to be inserted before you can remove them from the return bin. You have have to then return them to retrieve your Euro. This totally elimates the problem of the parking lot full of carts. (But then these people went and shot themselves in the foot by not fixing the cart's rear wheels, so they're hard as heck to contol. 🙁
Posted 11 Mar 2005 at 2:05am #
As an employee of Wal-Mart (although not a cart pusher, I sell cell phones in the Connection Center) I can say that the cart pushers thank you for your niceness. It makes it much easier if carts don't have to be hunted down all over the parking lot. And we all know Wal-mart tends to understaff most positions so time spent hunting down carts is more time you might wait for one of them to come help you load a TV into your car or something.
Posted 11 Mar 2005 at 11:21am #
I wouldn't have. I would be mad but I'm a pussy. Yesterday I saw 3 guys and 1 girl walking from a car and the girl was carrying a really big suitcase and really struggling with it. I really wanted to yell "Help her with that suitcase!!". Alas, pussy.
Posted 11 Mar 2005 at 12:53pm #
I think you're being much too hard on that woman, I mean, 15 whole feet is a lot of distance to cover with an empty shopping cart! 😛
I don't think her behavior was disgusting, that's too harsh of a word. I'd call it lazy. Disgusting would be placing her cart between two cars right in front my car door. Which has happened to me and I gave that jerkoff what for.
Posted 11 Mar 2005 at 6:05pm #
Those people who can't be bothered to put their carts away really bug me.
But not as much as stores which don't have any cart return areas, though. Or the really stupid ones where one aisle in the parking lot has four cart return areas and the other six aisles don't.
Posted 11 Mar 2005 at 10:14pm #
I probably wouldn't have said anything about the shopping cart. Honestly, I don't expect much from my fellow Wal Mart shoppers. But I would feel the same way in a different situation. Once I was walking outside, about ten feet behind some teenage kid, and he literally tossed his soda bottle on the ground behind him when he had finished it. So I picked it up, and I'm pretty sure he realized I had when I passed him a few seconds later.
Another time I was sitting in traffic and some bimbo four cars in front of me in the next lane rolls down the window of her air-conditioned SUV and discards the cellowrap from her cigarette pack, right out the window. I really wanted to go up and pick it up and knock on the window and hand it back to her and say something rude. I was boiling mad. But traffic started moving, and I didn't. The fact that I remember it means I'm not entirely satisfied with having done nothing about it.
Posted 12 Mar 2005 at 2:12pm #
Snarky!
I wouldn't have said anything. People who are inconsiderate fall into one of a few categories... typically considerate but currently absentminded; typically considerate but ignorant of a particular courtesy; or typically incosiderate and self absorbed. (There may be more, but I will work with these three.)
For the first category, I wouldn't want to be "snarky" to someone who is just having a bad day already thinking about their life problems and thereby making her day worse over a triviality. For the second category, it might do some good to let the lady know, but I'd want to be considerate as possible about my response, because I'm probably dealing with someone just as courteous and well meaning as I feel that I am. Finally, if the lady is just a bitch nothing I do or say will impact her at all.
In this shopping cart situation I would think that she should know better, so I'd guess that the lady falls in one of the other two categories and I wouldn't bother to tell her anything. I'd just grab her cart for her, 'cause I'm not perfect and I know I'd love it if people would pick up the slack for me when I am out to lunch or acting like a jerk.
Posted 13 Mar 2005 at 6:22pm #
At my local Wal-mart parking lot, "immediately outside the vehicle" is also the place most use for disposing of disposable diapers (used), or abandoning boxes of puppies or kittens.
Sometimes they will find another place for the items however. If they spot you leaving with a large bag of pet food, the box of baby animals you saw in the lot an hour earlier, will suddenly appear in the yard of your home. So they aren't always lazy in these actions.
Why don't you write Wal-Mart and tell them they need to attract a classier set of customers? Or perhaps, they could use the parking lot cams to snap shots of such behavior, and place them in the windows of the stores for all to see.
Posted 02 Jul 2006 at 1:50am #
That really pisses me off, I am a cart pusher at wal-mart in ardmore, and peole think they can leave their carts everywhere and walk off, by the time I have mmy lot cleaned I go and ask a CSM to check my lot, when we go outside there are cart still left on the lot that I know I did not see when I went inside, and the CSM told me I cannot leave till the lot is cleared of all carts, and the carts keep appearing and I said screw it and left.
Remember this people put your carts in a bin, you are making it hard on us cart pushers, we don't like to stay late, we like to go home and sleep so we can be rested up for the next day, we don't like to stay at wal-mart and pick up your carts you left in the parking space.