<
https://behavioralscientist.org/why-dont-people-return-their-shopping-carts-a-somewhat-scientific-investigation/>
"I arrived on the scene early one Saturday. The suspects were long gone, but
the evidence remained. One cart was wedged into a curb, another sat toppled
over in a parking spot, a third drifted like a metal tumbleweed across the lot.
My question:
Why don’t people return their shopping carts?
I’m a psychologist who has spent the past decade studying how we think about
our own behavior in relation to others. Perhaps the choice to not return a
shopping cart seems trivial, but what we do with our cart says a lot about how
we think about others and what we believe we owe one another (or don’t).
I’ve never understood why people don’t put their carts away. In high school, I
worked as a shopping cart attendant at my local grocery store, shepherding
carts across the lot. Since then, for reasons I can’t fully explain, people’s
failure to return their carts bothers me more than it probably should, with
every trip to the grocery store a reminder of the special kind of havoc
humanity is capable of.
Then last year, on a windy weekend morning in a Wegman’s parking lot, it hit
me. Not a cart, but the realization that I can do something productive about
it.
So I approached the question of shopping cart abandonment the way I would any
puzzle about human behavior: I collected data. My evidence came from an
unlikely source: Cart Narcs, a small group of volunteers whose mission is to
encourage cart return, sometimes gently, sometimes less so. They upload their
efforts on their YouTube channel, which boasts hundreds of videos recorded
between 2020 and 2025, taking place mostly in California, but also Nevada,
Texas, Louisiana, New York, Canada, Australia, and England. Cart abandonment,
it turns out, knows no regional bounds. As of September 2025, these videos have
collectively been viewed over 90 million times. (See below for one of the tamer
videos.)"
Via Muse, who wrote "Great article!"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
