When people talk about returning the cart after shopping, does that include putting it in a corral, or do you have to take it all the way to the front of the store to be a good person?
When people talk about returning the cart after shopping, does that include putting it in a corral, or do you have to take it all the way to the front of the store to be a good person?
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.
pick one. it doesnt matter as long as you do it.
people push those carts all aroound the damn store but that last 25-100 feet is just a bridge too far. door or corral.
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's a very visible thing when people do it. It's not common where I'm from, but if 1,000 other people go to a store, then just one person leaving a cart in an awkward place pisses off 999 others.
It doesn't take much to make it seem like a lot of people are being inconsiderate, when it's much more likely that a small minority of people have a very wide reaching emotional impact.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had that job in high school. When I first started, someone who'd been doing it for years was showing me the ropes, and he pointed out that sometimes people who live nearby the store would just walk to the store, then walk home with the cart, and leave it at the apartment complex, so he would (and thereby I should) periodically walk down there to collect them.
I initially thought this was complete BS and I hated that I was being asked to do it. After the first week or so, I realized what was actually up: He was inviting me to take paid breaks every hour or two, during which I got to take a leisurely 20 minute walk down the street and back, and not have to deal with customers or managers or anyone else, and he'd managed to sell this to management as a benefit to the company. He was an awesome co worker.
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.
before they had the robots that push them for the workers
What you talking bout Willis? Doesn’t every store have some poor schmuck pushing them around by hand?
The store bolts a cart to one of these:
https://danetechnologies.com/shopping-cart-retrievers/
And then the person wrangling carts will pull carts out of the corral and load them up in front of this.
They carry a remote that makes the retriever move forward, so the employee can just stand at the front of the (sometimes surprisingly long) train of carts and steer it.
These things push way harder than a teenager in a back support belt could ever accomplish, so it both increases efficiency of retrieval (more carts at once) and reduces the chances of injury.
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.
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
Stabbing at the Shitty 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.
The cart in the corral or the knives in the drawer? 🤔
imagines you just tossing your cart on top of the other carts in a show of strength
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.
I usually walk it back to the cart manufacturer, recycling is good
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.
Corral
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.
The brief time I worked in a grocery store I liked when people didn't return their carts, so I could go outside and fuck around
So I've live a few places around the US (all east of the Missisip. So it's not like a good survey), but the place that is worst for this has been southern Louisiana (north shore). Everywhere kinda sucks, but it's anarchy there.
If they have a corral, I take from the corral and put back in the corral. If there's a random cart between my car and the building, I grab that and return it to the corral.
Unpopular opinion: If the parking lot is uncrowded then there's nothing wrong with leaving your cart in an empty spot. Its not like the workers are gonna be given an extra breaktime if they don't have to collect carts, the store is paying the workers per hours and will always make sure they have tasks to do 100% of the time no matter what happens. I've even heard online multiple store workers say they prefer collecting carts over many of the other tasks they have to do.
So if you aren't giving the workers more work to do, and you aren't inconveniencing other parkers, then i don't see any harm in leaving a cart in a random empty parking spot of an uncrowded lot.
EDIT: just for the record, i do always return my carts, but i also think in some situations it's completely pointless
I guess that might be fine if you live somewhere were weather doesn't exist...but runaway shopping carts slamming into vehicles and causing damage is a real problem.
He doesn't care about his car, so why should he care about somebody else's property? Way to many people think like this, that's why they fail the shopping cart test.
Do you just throw your garbage on the ground so janitors have something to do too? Pat yourself on the back while doing it?
The point is to not be blocking a spot or if heavy wind picks up having the shit fly across the whole parking lot.
I hope a loose shopping cart almost hits your car just enough to give you that jolt of adrenaline from thinking your stuff is about to get ruined.
As someone who had that job as a teenager, saying it's better than other tasks is not a high bar. Yeah sure, it sucks less than cleaning the bathrooms or dealing with particularly shitty customers, but that doesn't mean I was pumped to have to walk the whole fuckin lot to gather all the loose carts that lazy assholes couldn't be bothered to put back. Gee thanks for the extra work for the lowest paid person at the store, how generous.
Randomly placed carts are in the way and there is no reason ever to not put them away.
I've even heard online multiple store workers say they prefer collecting carts over many of the other tasks they have to do.
Oh, a random person asserted a claim based on nothing? Well then, point well proven
EDIT: just for the record, i do always return my carts, but i also think in some situations it's completely pointless
Still wrong. It's been well demonstrated that there is always a point, be it courteousness or safety. Even if someone thinks it's doing some kind of favour for the workers, it's still creating an obstacle and/or hazard for other people using the parking lot.
A lot of people are saying they did this job as a teenager, I did it mid 20's and yes, I liked the job. I never had to deal with customers, I just pushed carts. But people leaving carts in the middle of nowhere were a babe on my existence.
I don't know how many carts there were in or store but on a normal day and especially a busy day they would be constantly used. Our corrals would all overflow simultaneously if not emptied. And then you have some dipshit who decides they can't be asked to walk a little further. I had to have a route in order to collect carts and keep our corrals under control. If I had to walk an extra 10 minutes out of my way to get a cart it would set me back 20+ minutes of work, without fail. And if I didn't collect it then carts would start piling up, without fail. Then you'd get the mixed cart bullshit and you can only push so many mixed carts.
Putting your cart makes the job actually reasonable. You can plan and coordinate and organize yourself to know where to go when to pick up carts. It allows you to predict where carts will end up and efficiently walk so you're not destroying your body. When people screw with that rhythm the whole thing goes to pot.
Why are you the judge of what conditions make it acceptable?
As an occasional cart pusher, I'd absolutely agree when the weather is nice. Being able to chill for a second as I walk to get the straggling cart is nice. If it's raining or extremely cold/hot out tho, fuck anyone doing that; I wanna get as many carts in as I can as fast as I can.
