What Does It Say About Your Neighbors If They Abandon Shopping Carts? [Block Talk]

ACROSS AMERICA — Have you heard about the “shopping cart theory”?

It holds that a person’s moral character and ability to self-govern can be determined by whether they return the shopping cart to the store or a corral in the parking lot or just abandon it.

Grocery and other stores are vital assets in neighborhoods. Their owners have wrestled for years about what to do about people who abandon their carts.

For example, the Aldi grocery store chain requires customers to deposit a quarter to unlock carts, and the money is returned when carts are. The issue of stranded carts is almost nonexistent at Aldi stores, and it reduces the number of employees dedicated to rounding up carts, store officials have said.

Logic holds that, unless some dire emergency prevents it, the right and correct thing to do is return the shopping cart to where it belongs when you’re done using it, even if abandoning it isn’t illegal. The critical question posed in the shopping cart theory is, will people do what’s right without being forced or threatened with repercussions such as fines?

Exploring the topic in a 2017 blog post in Scientific American, anthropologist Krystal D’Costa said people may leave their shopping park stranded for a number of reasons, such as:

• Bad weather;
• Reluctance to leave a child unattended while they return it;
• A physical disability that restricts movement;
• The distance of the collection receptacle from where they’ve parked;
• A perception it’s someone’s job to gather the carts and return them to the store; or
• A belief that leaving the cart near a parking space will make it convenient for someone else to use.

All of that leads us to these questions for Block Talk, Patch’s exclusive neighborhood etiquette column: Is it ever OK to abandon a shopping cart? What’s the first thing that pops into your head when you have to dodge a stranded shopping cart or two as you search for an empty parking spot? Have you ever pressed the matter, and if so, how did that go?

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About Block Talk

Block Talk is an exclusive Patch series on neighborhood etiquette — and readers provide the answers. If you have a topic you’d like for us to consider, email beth.dalbey@patch.com with “Block Talk” as the subject line.