The Cart of the Matter

For a guy who doesn't cook, and yet has never missed a meal (as you'd know from looking at me), I spend a fair amount of time in supermarkets. Not that I do heavy shopping in terms of grocery purchases, but I'm a specialist at 'grabbing odds and ends' (sometimes odd beyond description), and those 'ooh! this looks like it would be great!' items that far too often we didn't need.

I used to just scoop items up with my two hands, but they filled too quickly so then I’d take a basket when I'd enter the store which was supposed to keep me from going overboard except about halfway through, the basket was overflowing, and I had to double back to get a shopping cart. I think if groceries could put some carts near the middle of the store for those of us who overachieve in the gathering portion of the hunter/gatherer reenactment, there’d be a lot more smiling faces, mostly men, in grocery stores.

I use the self-checkout and bagging registers, put the bags in the cart, push the cart to the car, unload it, and return it to one of the cart corrals in the parking lot.

Shopping areas have cart corrals all over to make it easier for us to return the carts and where at some point(s) during the day, someone gathers them together and brings them back into the store where the whole process begins again. Like the Circle of Life (but without Elton John).

Except, and you know this because you see it too, shopping carts end up everywhere across the parking lot EXCEPT in the corrals. As an Oldest Child, I have some strand of DNA that compels me, when returning my cart, to drag another renegade one along with it back to the corral. Yeah, I concede it's like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon but if we each did it our shoreline might have a lot more beach if you follow my drift.

There's a theory that's surfaced in recent months that argues returning our shopping carts is a litmus test of our ability to self-govern. The theory may also suggest some of us have way too much time on our hands, but the main point (and no argument here) is that returning the cart is pretty easy to do and something we can all admit we should do.

It's not illegal to NOT return the cart (which explains why I've found them wheels up on the sidewalk on Sachem Street and at someone's side door while walking down Broadway), and no one is punished for failing to bring the cart back to the corral. It's just the right thing to do.

I admit there's no reward, except at one store where you rent the cart for a quarter and get it back when you return it, except to know you've done a good deed. And as not just my mom used to say, the reward for doing a good deed should be the knowledge that you've done one.

I think I like the idea of the shopping cart return as a gauge of how considerate and kind we are towards one another, and as a practical matter, if we'd all get better at doing it, we'd all be driving more cars and trucks with fewer dings.
-bill kenny