Hacker News Reader

Comment by hackthemack | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a grocery store for a while in my teens and early twenties. It is really a surprise to me that this has become an internet topic and even more surprising how strongly people feel like it is a litmus test for good vs bad. I just do not think it is a good litmus test. People are busy, some people have kids. Who is really being inconvenienced?

One thing I want to point out is that everyone I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts. The employees saw it as a mini-break from the drudgery of the day.

From having to go get carts many times, I will say, that if someone leaves their cart in a parking spot... well that is bad behavior. But if they just push it into the grass, or out of the way, who cares if it is tucked away there, or tucked away at cart corral. Someone has to go out and get the carts anyway, and it broke up the day, got you outside.

View on HN

> People are busy, some people have kids

Unless you're "having kids" in the sense that you're about to give birth to one, saving 30-60 seconds isn't going to make a difference in your day. It's like trying to optimize your travel timing so you can stop at fewer red lights. Maybe it gives someone the illusion of efficiency, but no one is really saving any time.

Most people who leave carts don't mind them blocking others' paths. If you're going out of your way to push one over the curb and into the muddy grass, you might as well have parked it in the designated spot by now.

Where I am, large enough stores have dedicated "outside" employees, most of whose time is be spent pushing carts. For them it's not a fun change of pace, it's just their job. If everyone put their carts back in an orderly fashion, they would need to do less weaving in parking lot traffic and trudging through horrible weather than they otherwise have to. Sure, "it's their job", but I don't want to make it even harder, especially considering how much they tend to be paid.

Remember to put lots of dumb stuff in PRs, because it's "someone's job" to peer review your code. ;)

Funny how peoples' attitude toward retail employees probably wouldn't extend to more work being created for them in their work.

There's a pretty fundamental difference between additional low priority but necessary busy work for a salaried employee and one of the better tasks you get to do as a min-wage retail employee.

Back when I worked in retail, my car was dented multiple times from people not putting carts in the designated areas.

Sometimes you can't park without getting out of the car to clean up after other people, because carts are littering the parking spaces. (Including being pushed from adjacent spots into handicap spaces.)

I've parked near corrals and had people half-ass push them next to it, effectively double parking me until I removed several carts.

I've had to jump out of the way of carts being whipped down an aisle by a strong wind in a storm.

Nobody's talking about bringing carts back to the building, but doing the bare minimum of putting them in the corrals. Failing to do so is saying you value your minor convenience over other peoples' time, property and health. Tucking them on a curb is saying you know you're doing a bad thing but don't really care.

Same re: grocery work and liking getting carts as a teen.

That said

> But if they just push it into the grass, or out of the way,

One marker of whether something is acceptable in society(or having a functioning brain, at times) is to ask oneself "what would happen if everyone did what I'm doing." This applies to most things...littering, talking on speakerphone or blasting music in public, etc. I think this example would similarly fail this test, imagining hundreds of carts piled up somewhere 'out of the way.'

If everyone did it then you'd probably have a dedicated person to fetch the carts doing that basically throughout their shift. The store still needs the carts for more shoppers and with everyone putting them in the grass that process ends up taking longer.

Except for particularly busy times, I don't think you'd see major pile ups.

But I generally agree with what you are saying. It's a valuable question to ask "what if everyone did this".

Yeah and if everyone was littering all the time, the city might employ more dustmen. Or they would say screw it, why waste money and time, when the citizens obviously don't want to live in a clean city.

Maybe everyone should just start murdering people that bothered them ;P. That way we'd have less annoying people and more police.

Ah yes. It's pouring rain, blowing cold wind in your face, kids are screaming and hitting each other, you stubbed your toe into cart and generally just having bad day. What would jesus do?

He wouldn’t be at the store; or perhaps flipping tables.

He got two fishes and five loaves delivered in a clear door dash advertisement.

I feel like the recent and strange habit of people telling me, unprompted, all about their assorted minor medical maladies, syndromes, and treatments -- is a form of "I don't always do the right thing because of these tribulations that I suffer"

Like it's pre-loading being an asshole. I hate it. Have your bad day in a way that doesn't continue the dominoes falling and causing other bad days, however much misery loves company.

Is the standard to return the cart or not? Where do you draw the line? What if it’s only raining? How hard does it need to be raining to sacrifice your principles?

On days with a strong wind it is more important to rerun the cart, because leaving it loose will mean it’s likely to hit someone’s car. This is when the golden rule comes into play.

It just doesn't matter. It's a cart, not clubbing baby seals.

Only thing that's more insufferable is the keyboard warriors loosing sleep over tiny things like that.

Did you think we'd find this string of excuses basically lifted from the article convincing?

I've had bad days. I still managed not to be a net negative on my environment. Why can't you? Why can't other people? From my perspective, how you behave when you're having a bad day is the real litmus test. If you're still a decent person then, then you actually have values you care about, that you don't just follow when convenient.

Show me a person and I'll point their flaws.

Theoretically, in this case, the agonizing "It's pouring rain, blowing cold wind in your face, kids are screaming and hitting each other, you stubbed your toe into cart and generally just having bad day" scenario making any man unable to manage the extra-harrowing effort of directing a cart a few meters into a designated space.

He'd tip the cart over so it doesn't blow around in the wind.

Then it just becomes an informal cart corral.

I worked at a grocery store as well and we didn’t even have a place to return carts. Even after I got moved up to doing stock, I told the manager I’d be happy to go get carts, especially in the winter when no one else wanted to do it. I thought it was fun to go out there and slide around on them.

We had some woods and a little stream next to the parking lot. Some people would chuck the carts into the woods. That’s probably considered bad behavior, but for me, that was just more time I could spend outside and a little adventure to fetch the cart and get it back up the hill through the trees.

I could see working at a big store where you’re expected to bring in 50 carts at a time to be annoying. I was at a smaller places and would only bring in 5 or 6 at a time. Some of the managers would get annoyed at that, but I was getting minimum wage and was the only person who didn’t complain about the cold and snow, so they could just deal with my pace. I wanted to make sure I could control what I was pushing, so I didn’t hurt anyone or break anything. We don’t even have a rope, like I see most places have now.

I talked to a guy who used to run a grocery store. There were low-income housing apartment buildings nearby. People would walk to the store, buy groceries, and then just roll the damn carts back to their buildings down the street.

Sounds terrible but the owner didn't mind, or at least didn't discourage it. Those people didn't have cars and if they had to carry groceries home by hand they'd just buy less groceries or perhaps not shop there at all. He would just drive a pickup truck to the apartment building at the end of the day to collect carts.

When he began the story I thought it was about to be a racist story about "low-income" people (bit of a barely-disguised dog whistle there) but it wound up being pretty cool. An ad-hoc system that worked to everybody's benefit.

As a fellow former grocery store employee, I can agree about the “break up the monotony” concept from the narrow POV of the bored worker.

It is an inconvenience though, even if as insignificant as an eyesore for others, or the landscaper who may need to remove shopping carts from the planter to do their work.

You could apply similar logic to people who carelessly throw trash in the recycling bin or on a sidewalk where it’s someone else’s job to clean up after them. I’ve seen people go as far as to say they are graciously “providing a job” for someone else when they throw their refuse in the recycling bin.

The fact that the shopping carts are such an inconsequential thing to shrug off is what makes them a great litmus test — will you do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do, even when there is so little at stake

> I’ve seen people go as far as to say they are graciously “providing a job” for someone else when they throw their refuse in the recycling bin.

The great thing about the “job creation” theory of antisocial behavior is that it justifies all kinds of things, from graffiti to dumping to stealing decorative plants from the local park. Why bother following implicit (or even explicit) rules if there is no consequence? Surely it won’t have any consequences in the long run!

Murder and incarceration create jobs too. At what point does job creation change from an excuse to an obligation?

Making war, creates an awful lot of jobs in the construction industry!

I avoid the automated checkouts in part because it takes jobs away from robots. Am I a bad person for creating jobs for humans?

I confess I am a hypocrite though, as I'm one of those job-stealing people that return the cart to the corral.

I am busy. I am a principal engineer on call working 60 hour weeks with an active social life and 2 kids under 4yo...

I always return my cart.

The theory holds and you are making excuses for bad behaviors

I second this and relate heavily

Anyone saying they’re too busy to return the cart but not busy enough to use grocery pickup or delivery must have a very calibrated life.

> People are busy, some people have kids.

It takes 30 seconds to return a cart. Nobody is so busy or has so many kids as to not be able to wheel the cart into the cart stall. If you have that many kids, then you probably can't really safely grocery shop in the first place.

The reason it gets brought up is exactly because it's a small thing to do that is generally accepted as being the right thing to do. You basically won't find someone defending not wheeling back the cart as being the right thing to do (outside of maybe a true emergency).

kid seats with straps are a thing for a reason, put the rugrat into the seat and then take the cart back.

as the parent said, it's a 30 second walk and if you can't trust kiddo not to die for 30 seconds you shouldn't be shopping w/ them in the first place.

If you have kids, you let them return the cart, because it is fun for them and already start to move the car out of the parking lot. That way you save even more time.

>Who is really being inconvenienced?

The workers, drivers, and potentially future shoppers.

>I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts.

You're getting the carts either way. I won't speak to if it helps to give you more time to yourself when collecting wayward carts, but there is some built in time for collections even with "good shoppers".

> if someone leaves their cart in a parking spot... well that is bad behavior

Yes, hence the shopping cart theory.

I'm not a perfect person but try to keep it out of parking those times I am tired. But I recognize that carts can still roll into the lot or that it increases risks of a future car who comes in.

This isn't exclusively about whether it inconveniences employees or not. I was also a grocery store worker and I would also enjoy cart getting in certain weather but I wouldn't want to do it at, for example, walmart. That's practically a contact sport.

No, this is simply about can people do small things to make the system better. Things that cost them essentially nothing but make the world work.

I hold a strong but unproven belief that a minority of people who are naturally more conscientious than ordinary are basically holding the world together at the seams.

Somebody's got to, and I've got a little extra time, so I guess I will.

Burns off the karma from being a trouble maker on IRC (sorry Undernet). Although doing things to burn karma just generates karma for doing good things for the wrong reasons.

Only those who return the cart for upright and pure reasons (disorder makes my skin crawl) will escape samsara

I have the inverted belief that most people are actually doing all right most of the time, but it's the squeaky wheels that stand out from the crowd and draw my attention all day long. There's just too many man-hours elapsed per day for a true minority to keep it stumbling along as gracefully as it does. We all have our bad days.

I've spent a lot of time cleaning up and observing a small strip of sidewalk in front of a retail establishment in a city and I've come to believe in a variation of the broken windows theory. If I let the sidewalk become too messy, or if I remove the trash but not the dead leaves in the fall then more trash will appear at a seemingly exponential rate. If I do a thorough job cleaning the entire area and removing all debris, however, it stays tidy for many hours, sometimes even days. I don't believe for one second that keeping the area tidy prevents people from littering there. I think the people who would drop their candy wrapper are going to do it anyway, but I think there are many people who, while walking through my tidy section of sidewalk, bend over and pick up the candy wrapper when they see it. I just think they don't bother when there's two or three candy wrappers, thus causing the observed effect.

The tragedy of the commons isn’t that most people take such good care of the commons. I bet people see your tidy walk and feel guilty about messing it up.

I've observed people picking up trash there, so I know it happens. I have a trash can right by my entrance so it's easy to throw stuff away properly.

Sometimes people do feel guilty dropping stuff, but usually only if they notice me watching them do it.

Grass might hold the cart in place, but most abandoned carts get dropped off in places where the wind can catch them and blow them into cars.

Fair point.

I did not usually see a free roaming cart though. Maybe times have changed. Usually, people would prop them up against a curb, or ditch them into a grassy spot, or they would put them by a low spot in the parking lot next to a drain, or put them next to a column on the sidewalk.

Just my anecdotal experience, it seemed like people would put their cart back if there was a cart corral in the center of every parking row.

Walmarts around me seem to have a corral every ten or so cars, hordes of them. I still encounter strays and that’s with them seeming having a dedicated cart cowboy (with his little train).

I once calculated the number of carts Walmart has worldwide and it was mind-boggling.

Are kids really the excuse? I was putting away the cart basically as early as I remember. It was extremely fun to do that as a kid. Ride the cart like a kick scooter then BANG slam it into the rack with the others.

I’ve noticed very few kids doing little chores like this these days. Maybe I just don’t notice it. Maybe it’s a sign of a wider rot regarding parenting. Maybe it’s nothing.

It's extremely sketchy to let your kid return the cart in the parking lot when the average vehicle's hood is at twice their standing height.

Actually glad to hear that. I always wondered if it was pure entitlement and laziness to walk past a loaded corral and then take a car at the entrance.

I also feel many feel (irrationally) that they are being ripped off by the store and thus won’t bother to return the cart out of spite.

Imagine, if you will, a society where it had become commonplace and normal for people to throw their trash on the ground, and there were people who were expected as part of their working duties to pick up this trash and put it in a wastebin. It wouldn’t really matter whether the worker minded this duty, or whether it was commonly accepted behavior, or whether it was a bit inconvenient to dispose of the trash properly, or whether the person was a bit busy. Some people, probably those raised a certain way, would automatically intuit that there is something wrong with this and throw out their own garbage. They might even pick up one or two pieces others had left behind, too. But who is really being inconvenienced?

When employees are forced to spend time collecting carts prices at the store go up . Customers are the ones being inconvenienced by higher prices when people abandon their carts.

Speaking of memes, you just did one:

> Who is really being inconvenienced?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/smugjak-but-how-does-this-aff...

> One thing I want to point out is that everyone I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts

You must've lived someplace with good weather. I can't imagine it being fun in a snowstorm.

> some people have kids.

I remember my brothers and I liked doing it because we'd ride on the sides of the cart while putting it away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com