There must have been 6 or 7 carts under that street light. I was in the parking lot of Stop and Shop, waiting for my dad to come back. My sister and my mom were in the car with me. I counted the carts that were bunched up under a pole. There were 8. Now there were 9 because a woman had just pushed hers out in front of her and got in her car. Without hesitation, I got out of the car and took the cart the 25 yards it took to get to the cart return. Right in front of her. It then took me and my sister a combined time of two minutes to take 13 carts to the cart return. If we could take back 14 carts in two minutes, why can’t people put one cart back?

There is no legitimate reason for not taking your shopping cart back to the cart return, unless you are restricted. Cart returns are strategically placed around parking lots, so the furthest most people really have to go to get to one is around 25-30 yards. However, going into any parking lot, you’ll find a lot of people leave their shopping carts wherever they desire it. Scientific American says there are a few reasons that people don’t take their carts back, like if they have a child, or if the weather is bad. However, in most instances, people are just lazy. Sometimes people just leave them by the curb, but when people carelessly leave them in other parking spots so people can’t pull into them or leave them in the middle of the street where cars go down, that’s when I noticed it was a problem. 

ALDI maintains a system that successfully prevents people from leaving their carts in the parking lot of the store. When you go to ALDI, to get a shopping cart, you must stick a quarter in a slot to release your cart from the return. To get your quarter back, you must take your cart to the cart return. And seeing a cart unreturned in an ALDI parking lot is something that you don’t typically see. I think every store should try using these methods or at least something like it, to prevent people from merely leaving their carts wherever. 

Even if stores don’t implement these methods, people must put their carts back out of respect for other shoppers and cart employees. Not many people enjoy going to the store, seeing an empty parking spot and then realizing that no, there’s an astray cart blocking them from entering. Or having to clean up after adults like they are young children.

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