People! Time for a serious talk.
About shopping carts.
Who are these shoppers who heft their groceries into cars and then abandon carts in empty parking spots – where the buggies block vehicles, ding paint and impose more work on lowly store employees?
Here’s who. Shopping cart slackers.
Watch a slacker in action: he parks, walks into a store, walks down one aisle, walks up another aisle, walks through more aisles. Walks to checkout. Walks to the store exit. Walks to his car.
Then won’t walk to the cart cage – usually no farther, roundtrip, than one more pass through the cookie aisle.
Yes, the world has bigger problems. Climate change, cancer, homelessness, war. But those problems are too big to see how our individual actions, however earnestly offered, bring change.
We can end shopping cart slackery. The fix is just 15 seconds, 30 paces and kindness toward others.
Slackers, you know who you are.
You.
Know.
And the rest of us, the 13.9% of shoppers who push carts to the cart cage, have a message for you slackers:
Be kind.
WALK!
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I’m obsessive about this. I return the carts to the queue and even go so far as to rearrange the carts haphazardly left there to ensure they are slid together properly and snugly by size. When I was a small boy, my dad worked for Kroger, and when accompanying my mom on her weekly shopping trip, I sometimes would help him collect carts. So I learned this process early. Then after my senior year in high school, I spent one hot summer working for another Kroger, where I sometimes was assigned to collect the carts and move them back to the store. That was tedious and frustrating. I wish to save the sweat of those who have succeeded me in that role. Put the carts in the correct queue, people.
Right on, Steve.
I am handicapped: I get SOB when walking, have little energy and am 81. When I’m in the store, I have a cart to hold onto to keep me from losing my balance. I park carefully in handicapped spaces (have the tag), and then, most often, I place the cart so that other similar folks can easily grab it. Never directly in the handicap lane or in such a way as to block part of the space. I, too, abhor those who are so discourteous.