If they have the corral I put it in the corral. If not I will bring it back to the store or try to avoid taking it to my car in the first place so I can leave it at the store and not come back.
The key is to return the cart to a designated location where the store is asking that they be returned.
European here. I absolutely do NOT understand what everyone here is discussing. When I take the cart at mall, I just simply return it. What’s the biggie? Since I take it from the place closest to my car, I usually return it to the same one where I picked it up. To be honest it never ever even crossed my mind to leave it on the parking spot. Are you, the ones who do this, animals or what?
It is uncommon for US grocery stores and supermarkets to leave carts scattered around the parking lot in corrals on purpose. Typically there’s an employee who frequently retrieves all the carts and puts them in a huge covered stall just by the building entrance, so the corrals are often empty. Hell, some stores don’t have corrals at all.
i wonder what the association is between the size of a parking lot and the frequency of its stores buggies not being returned by shoppers. from the pictures of beautiful european cities and towns i’ve seen, walkability seems to be an important development concern. i’m sure not everywhere, but by contrast, many shopping areas in the us are concrete wastelands with stores wrapping around massive, massive parking lots. perhaps parking 1/4 mile away from the store you just left makes it easier for people to excuse themselves from doing the right thing. i guess we don’t have a great track record with doing the right thing in any context though.
walkability seems to be an important development concern
While true for more modern development, many beautiful, walkable European cities were simply built before cars were around, so it’s not like they made an extra effort to make them walkable, that’s just how things were done
thanks for the insight, which makes sense. stupid cars.
I mean cars do a lot of good, but yeah. The thing that messed up the US was a policy introduced in some places making a ridiculously high minimum number of parking spaces required for any business. And now, it’s pretty tough to overcome the way that made cities take shape, since now you kind of need to take a car to get places reasonably, meaning places need parking spots to make their customers feel like they can get in… It’s a viscous cycle
100%. it seems to me that the broad scaling of community played a critical factor, being born out of the privilege of personal vehicle transportation. now we live in one place, work in another, play in another, eat in another, etc. in some cases sure, maybe that could theoretically give you 3+ different circles of orbit and thus 3 different communities of fellowship and support. from experience though it looks more like an incongruent/lacking distribution of the kind of important ties between others that would otherwise develop organically within in a given community. ultimately it seems to reinforce our isolation and undermines a sense of belonging.
Same, same. Maybe one day I’ll travel there and see for myself. Where I live people just walk 10-20m, get a cart, go shopping, put the groceries in the car, walk the 20m again to return it and drive home. No being a prick being involved at the supermarket. However, I’ve observed that some people don’t return their carts at the IKEA.
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They mean the corral. That’s why the stores have the corrals spread out in the parking lot and hire people whose job is partly to bring the carts in.
As an introvert, doing a “cart run” was my temporary reprieve from the horrors of retail.
Ugh I hated that job. People would put mix the trolley sizes in each queue in the corral and I would want to release anthrax. I would be able to predict who was going to block up a corral of small trolleys with their jumbo trolley, just from the shape of their stupid hanging face.
I have to chime in on this one, I grew up in Oregon and worked at Target a couple of years as a cashier and cart collector. This was by far the most miserable job I have ever had, it sucked. Besides leaving their nasty ass trash and dirty diapers in the carts people would leave them scattered all over the mall parking lot. It was my job to walk a mile or so around the lot that encircled the mall at closing time in the pouring rain and collect them. This was before they had the robots that push them for the workers, so we used a rope attached to the front to steer about 35-40 at once. With out fail id consantly get my sopping wet feet run over by those fucking things while trying to push them back to the store. Not to mention, we’d get the occasional wind storm and the ones that weren’t corraled would blow all over the parking lot crashing into cars. Then we’d get bitched at by the customers. Trust me when you put a cart back in the corral, the people working at the store appreciate it. There’s more than enough other work to get done in retail.
Why have a corral if that’s not good enough? Of course the corral is fine, provided you actually put it in and not just in the general vicinity.
Corrals. ⛳
I’m a Gold Jacket member of the Shopping Cart Golf Masters. I sink carts in those bitch-ass skinny Walmart corrals in one shove from 2 aisles over on the regular.
It’s an elite league of one, but I’m enjoying my very limited notoriety.
One my simple joys in life is thrusting one of those bad boys in super hard and yelling “YEAH SMASH EM!!”
I get weird looks sometimes.
My grocery is a couple miles up the road from the county golf course. One day there was this older fella in the parking lot who was clearly stopped off after an afternoon on the links for a honey-do errand. He was a couple cars over. I hadn’t noticed him standing there watching me send one in from about 6 or 8 cars away. I threw my hands up as it slotted into a receiving cart (rare feat!) and turned around back towards my car about to WOOHOO when I catch this fella’s eye.
With a big grin on his face, he says “Nice shot! You should join my foursome next week.” Quick chuckle, thank you, and we both get on our way. I think about that guy every time I sink one and wonder if he started doing it himself.
Lmao that’s an awesome story. Damn I might start playing your game.
When you get decent at it, you start looking for the carts with the dodgy wheel, just to keep it interesting.
you can’t truly be a good person unless you establish was a bad person is first. Thats why I always murder someone on the way to the corral.
If it’s a mediocre corral you can call it a shooting at the ok corral
Any store that deserves compliance has corrals.
Corral, but put it there properly, not all askew as it it was a bloody kitchen drawer.
Really? I just toss them on top. It saves floor space if you go vertical.
The pro move is to go horizontal at first, then you do a bitchin’ wheelie and stack that vertically.
Hail Anoia!
First off - not a retail employee.
Untidy carts in the corral, for some reason, annoy me. Even if it takes a few minutes to sort them, for size and straightness, I have to - much to the annoyance of people who are waiting for me to get back to the car.
I guess it’s irritation at the bad people who cba to be considerate to the cart collectors. Ffs you aren’t doing someone’s job, you are making their lives a bit less shit for 30s of effort.
Sometimes I go above and beyond and TAKE a cart from the parking lot into the store and use it when I arrive. Imagine if everyone did that.
Don’t stop there. Bring a whole row of them.
and take some poor kid’s job? (think of all the lessons about hard work that kid won’t learn…sheesh.)
I hear Jeff Bezos first work ever was a cart collector.
Imagine who can you become.
Don’t stop there . Bring every one of them.
I usually walk it back to the cart manufacturer, recycling is good
Corral
I work retail, I occasionally have to push carts. The corral is good enough. Also frankly, even leaving the cart loose in the parking lot is better imo than the people who leave their carts inside the store right in front of the racks of carts, but don’t actually rack it up(or even face it the right way to be racked up). As soon as even one person does it, everyone does it, and I have to waste fuck loads of time just clearing the entrances of loose carts.
Loose in the parking lot is bad to me because one good gust of wind can make the cart roll into a vehicle.
Eh, I don’t get paid enough to care about peoples cars, I just want them in the corrals so it’s easier to deal with them. I’ll of course stop a cart from hitting a car if it was my fault it was about to happen, but if the wind pushes a loose cart that’s between the car owners and god at that point. I drive a shitbox so I personally could not care less if a cart dings it.
It’s not your fault it’s the customers who don’t put their carts back combined with those of us who care about our cars.
The issue, besides making minimum wage workers lives hell, is that the carts offten end up in the street, and can become a hazard or hit people’s cars. If it doesn’t have a corral, then take it to the store. Otherwise take it to the corral.
