That's a weird take. The shopping part is provided to you for free for your convenience. Not returning the shopping cart means you are creating a nuisance for other people who are coming to the store to get the things that they need. It is blocking parking spots, potentially going to damage somebody's car, and no longer in a centralized location.
Not returning it is inconsiderate in multiple ways.
Nah, yours is the dumb take. I guess returning your 3D glasses at the end of a movie is too much "unpaid labor" for you. How about cleaning up your table at a restaurant that doesn't have servers? I guess you just leave the mess sitting there huh?
A long time ago I worked at a grocery store and I preferred it when people didn’t return the carts. Would you rather spend your day gathering carts outside or gathering carts for 10 minutes at a time and then having to deal with customers?
If there was a law punishing people for not putting shopping carts back, I would deliberately break it and sue whatever stupid fucking government passed such a thing under the grounds listed in the post.
A law like that would be a violation of our rights. You can't just use government to force people to do whatever you want. We have rights.
A law like that would be a violation of our rights
We have a right to not clean up after ourselves? Tell me more
The fact is you're borrowing a cart from it's owner, probably a store. If the store requires you to put it back and you don't the they would be within their rights to sue you over it. The only reason they don't is because their damages would be massively less valuable than their legal fees and the time it would take to present a lawsuit.
You really do. Governments can't arbitrarily make you do whatever they want through laws; they have to have good reasons for it that are acceptable by the people, and no one thinks it's acceptable for governments to harm their own citizens over an act the OP emphatically tells us harms no one.
An act that really doesn't mean anything more than a minor inconvenience and annoyance for everyone else.
I return the shopping cart entirely out of the fact that ai fucking hate it when people leave the cart in the parking space. But yeah if theres a concrete sidewalk or something I may leave it there if the return area is a row of cars away.
Safely, but still creating more work for store employees to collect the carts and possibly inconveniencing pedestrians. Point 1 for the moral absolutists.
Some stores hire students to continuously gather all the shopping carts and return them to the hubs. Altough, I think nowadays all stores in my country use the coin operated carts, so if you don't return the cart, you don't get your coin back.
I suppose if it was dire you save those 30s, it's acceptable.
But you would not be immune to being judged by a third party. They wouldn't know the situation is dire unless explaining it, which would take at least a few seconds.
I'm having a tough time imagining a scenario where you're in too much of a hurry to spend 30 seconds returning the cart, but not too much of a hurry to buy your merchandise and load it in your vehicle.
Unless you get a phone call just after unloading your shit into your car what sort of emergency allows you to shop but still demands literally no second be spared?
There were two young kids at my old Aldi who got the bright idea to hang around the parking lot and offer to return carts for people. I bet they made some decent money.
I am glad I live in a place where many grocery stores don't have this problem, because they don't have parking lots, because most of their customers don't even have a car much less would drive it to get groceries if they did. (Yes, I do realize how fortunate I am.)
