Why don't people return their shopping carts?

Shopping Cart as Moral Litmus Test

• Many commenters endorse the “shopping cart theory”: returning a cart is an easy, unenforced “right thing,” so failing to do it signals selfishness or unfitness for a high‑trust society.
• Some extend this: how you behave on bad days (rain, kids screaming, tired) is the real test of character and values.
• Others generalize to “small acts” like littering, facing products, holding subway doors, queuing in traffic, or how you treat waitstaff.

Counterarguments & Practical Excuses

• Several people argue it’s a poor moral test: parents juggling small children, disabled people using carts as mobility aids, or those having a terrible day may reasonably skip the extra walk.
• Some ex‑grocery employees say they liked doing cart duty as a break from indoor drudgery, so abandoned carts weren’t clearly harmful from their perspective.
• A minority explicitly admit they don’t return carts, sometimes framing it as harmless, trivial, or “not my problem.”

Impact on Others & the Commons

• Many emphasize concrete harms: carts denting cars, blocking parking spots (including disability spaces), creating hazards in wind or storms, and making lots look chaotic.
• This is often framed as a “what if everyone did this?” or broken‑windows/tragedy‑of‑the‑commons problem; conscientious minorities are seen as “holding the world together.”
• Some people pick up stray carts on the way in specifically to “leave the world slightly better.”

Culture, Design, and Incentives

• Commenters contrast US behavior with Europe and Japan, where carts are more consistently returned and coin‑deposit systems are common.
• Others note huge US parking lots and sparse corrals can make returns a multi‑minute walk, changing the calculus.
• Coin deposits are seen both as effective nudges and as turning a social norm into a transactional “I’m paying not to return it” arrangement.

Employees, Jobs, and “Job Creation” Rationalizations

• “They’re paid to do it” and “I’m creating jobs” are widely criticized as broken‑window fallacies: extra cleanup work ultimately raises costs or worsens conditions.
• Some ex‑employees counter that more stray carts did make their shifts easier or more pleasant in practice.

Cart Narcs & Public Shaming

• The article’s reliance on Cart Narcs videos is attacked for heavy selection bias.
• Many dislike the vigilante, filmed-confrontation style, seeing it as harassment, especially of people with invisible disabilities, and symptomatic of low social trust.