I worked at grocery stores for 7 years in my late teens and early 20s. People who don’t use cart corrals deserve nothing.
actual marriage material
I bring loose carts into the store on my way in, usually don’t use a cart since I bring bags
Grocery store owner: “Looks like customer altruism is ramping up again, time to lay off some more employees!”
If they could find a way to apply the same “self checkout” solution to cart return, you know they would in a heartbeat!
I argue that empathy, and the sympathy and compassion that flow from it, are the only things a person can be rightly judged by. It matters not one’s wealth, race, skill, ambition, charm, etc. Those are nice to have and can make life easier, but they don’t make a person better or worse. It only matters that they care about others, and anyone that cares about others and acts like it is a great person even if mistakes have been made.
If you think you’re a loser because you don’t have a girl/boyfriend and live with your parents or something but you care about others, you are a far greater person than Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or anyone like that to be certain.
Putting the cart in the corral is a little pleasure for me if there aren’t too many carts in it. I stand back a little and push it in and watch it go with glee like a small child.
You need to check out the cart narcs on YouTube!! They record themselves calling people out on not returning their carts, and the petty reactions from the lazy bones. They even have hood magnets for the unrepentant!! https://youtube.com/@CartNarcs
They’ve gotten some pretty unpleasant reactions, too. Like guns pulled on them.
And those people should not have guns.
They say that it’s the ultimate test of selflessness, because it doesn’t benefit you and there’s no recognition for it.
But does it cancel out the selflessness if I’m now thinking that every time I return a cart? “If someone sees me, they’ll know how selfless I am…”
Honestly unless you believe there is inherent good in doing that (religion mostly, morality for some) then no. It doesn’t make sense to work for free, to not have returns.
If recognition is a form of payment then good on some people, though I personally think recognition can be a drug, and religion justifies my good actions for me much better.
Point is keep on doing good, and maybe consider that the slightly tidier and cleaner space you leave was worth the effort. Surely someone would have seen you and thought “damn, I should do that next time”
It doesn’t make sense for the individual unless you consider that they live in a society. You would be annoyed to have to retrieve a wayward cart and by returning your cart you enforce the expectation and social pressure on others to do the same. I don’t think it’s selfless to treat your environment with respect, it’s in your own best interest most of the time.
I had a teacher in highschool that presented the philosophical argument that no one ever does anything that is truly selfless. The argument was exactly what you mentioned, that if someone is doing something that appears selfless, they’re actually doing it in hopes that someone notices and thinks more highly of them.
This would have been an interesting rebuttal to the argument. If you return a shopping cart in an empty parking lot, does that make you selfless? Kind of like a modern version of a tree falling in a forest…
i don’t think true selflessness exists, but i also think that is completely and utterly irrelevant.
Everything is fundamentally fueled by selfishness, but it seems to be a fundamental truth of the universe that cooperation is optimal for an individual if they can achieve it.
for example cooperation is the thing that allows us and animals like ants to be so hilariously more successful than other species, and on an ecosystem level everyone is cooperating since their chemical structures are compatible. If something were to evolve to use mirrored sugar (which is incompatible with the version of sugar molecules we use) then they’d have nothing but themselves to eat and thus promptly starve.
That’s why shopping carts in Germany are coin operated.
You only get your coin back, if you return the cart.
I made a bypass tool so I can know that when I return them it’s due to moral superiority and not base greed.
I take the ones people haven’t bothered to lock back in. My moral superiority knows no bounds.
Oh yeah? well!
Sometimes I round them all up, take the coins, and donate them anonymously to orphans with cancer.
Then one will never truly know if one is selfless or not as they now have an incentive to return it.
I would like to offer a different take on this, even if I’ll be downvoted to hell for it…
So, using Walmart in the US as an example:
They hire people to push carts from the cart returns back to the building and those people are also responsible for snagging the stragglers as well. By putting the cart back in the correct place you are reducing the amount of work that an hourly employee has to do during their shift, thereby reducing their potential hours and potential pay.
For me, it’s the same reason I hate the self checkout, because I’m not getting a discount for running a self serve register but Walmart is saving money by not paying an employee to do it.
I get how using a self checkout is nice because I don’t have to deal with a human, but the human I no longer have to deal with is another potential employee that was getting a paycheck…
I dRoP mY LiTtEr oN tHe fLoOr So SoMeBoDy HaS a JoB!
The problem with this take is that you are assuming there is a potential job or hours there to begin with that never existed in the first place and never will. Walmart has always had 15 checkout lanes and only two cashiers, even before self checkouts were a thing.
I guess you have a private chauffeur because you wouldn’t want that person to not have a job due to you selfishly driving your own car around.
And how many porters do you employ to carry you around all day. I know you wouldn’t want to cost any of them their jobs by walking around on your own two legs.
I wasn’t going to respond to this thread again because honestly I was just trying to get people thinking about the little guys, but people are taking it to the extreme, so sure I’ll bite.
There was a period when I was younger where I was barely making minimum wage, was on food stamps and WIC for my wife and newborn. I was lucky that I got out of that situation, but not everyone gets lucky.
When I look at the direction the future is heading with self serve kiosks, self checkouts, automation systems everywhere you look… I can’t help but worry about the people that are being replaced for the sake of corporate profits.
If we had universal basic income, I would say bring all of that stuff on. Since we don’t, my sympathy lies with the workers, not the corporations.
As technology advances, some jobs are going to disappear, but hopefully, those new technologies also add new jobs that didn’t exist before. Back in the day, it used to take a whole lot of people to harvest a field. Now it’s all done by one guy and a big tractor or two. But people need to build those tractors, program the controller, repair them as they break, etc. More kiosk and self checkouts are going to need techs and repairs. It’s just how things work. It probably won’t be long when some store switches back to using actually staff because it’s a unique feature when no one else has human staff anymore. Like how people buy Amish furniture now because it’s like the only way to get handmade furniture today.
Saying to leave a mess so a company “has” to hire a janitor is just a dumb way to express the idea that there needs to be more jobs.
I get the fear that if automation keeps picking up, there may be a time where there truly aren’t enough jobs to go around, (A.I. is really fucking scary at how fast it is improving) but hopefully if technology advances that far we’ll also see improvements in agriculture, housing, and power generation to the point that people don’t need a shitty $15 an hour job or a “free” paycheck just to not starve to death in the street because hopefully providing clean water and food won’t be as hard as it is now.
Universal basic income is just a dumb idea. You are taking money from someone who works hard for a living, making life harder for them, just so someone else doesn’t have to work for a living. It is the core concept of communism. What happens when no one wants to work because they can just get the free income? Did your teachers really never do the average grading experiment with you? Instead of getting the grade you actually got on an assignment, everyone just gets the classes’ average grade. No one should fail, but at the cost of a few good students getting worse letter grades. It lasts for one or two assignments before most people just stop doing the work and now everyone is failing because the few people that are still doing the work can’t get high enough grades to average a whole class of zeros out to more than Fs.
If it’s something you are really concerned about, then really try to find a solution that doesn’t involve forced labor on one group of people, so another group can benefit. Our ancestors did that shit for years back when it still took people to harvest a farm, and most people are still pretty upset about it to this very day.
And I’m European
We’ll pray for you. /s
I think that was just Paris
This is unironically how i judge if someone is a decent person. It costs you nothing, and requires minimum effort, and yet most people I meet just can’t be bothered. I don’t even work in retail, nor have I ever, but it just annoys the hell outta me that people are that inconsiderate. It’s not like Sam Walton himself is asking you to put the cart away for him. When you don’t do it some minimum wage employee has to chase them down. You’re not better than them. You’re capable of doing the minimal task asked of you.
As previously stated, I’ve met way to many people like this. Pox on the Earth. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Reminds me of shopping cart theory.
Words of wisdom right there.
That’s gotta be the only decent thing to ever come out of 4chan
Plenty of good things come out of 4chan, it’s just that the bad ones outnumber them by a lot.
Kind of like with humans in general.
I still feel bad about the one time I didn’t return a shopping cart.
A creepy guy was hitting on me and wouldn’t take no for an answer, didn’t feel safe to go anywhere but in my car and the fuck out of there.
That’s on the dude, not you. As a larger guy who has never not returned a cart in his life, I’d have done the same lmao
