There are many unlikely moral battlefields in this world. The grocery store parking lot is such a place. On the hallowed fields of Costco, Loblaws and Canadian Tire, drivers fight between the yellow lines to defend their sense of right and wrong. Some park where they shouldn’t. Some park poorly. Some flaunt the rules and drive straight into “back-in-only” parking spaces. Parking pirates park illegally.
Today, however, let us consider that other four-wheeled menace of the parking lot – the shopping cart. Many a voice has been raised in anger, all because of the mild-mannered wagons.
Aside from the dents and scratches they leave anonymously on our automobiles, the main issue with shopping carts is their placement. Let’s review standard shopping cart procedure.
Seven steps to shopping cart usage:
- Take shopping cart from cart corral.
- Enter shop and push cart around shop.
- Place items into shopping cart.
- Purchase items.
- Push shopping cart to automobile.
- Unload items.
- Return shopping cart to the nearest cart corral or cart collection area.
No one has any trouble with steps one to six.
Step seven, however, is a doozy.
That’s why most parking lots are littered with stray shopping carts that have been abandoned, pushed out into the asphalt and left to fend for themselves.
How many times have you begun to drive into a space only to find it already occupied by a shopping cart?
How many times have you tried to drive out of a spot only to find a shopping cart in the way?
How many times have you found that a new dent has mysteriously appeared on your car while you were shopping, and found a shame-faced shopping cart close by?
Have you ever seen a driver casually push a cart out into the empty space, as a store employee on “cart duty” struggles to push a stack of two dozen carts to the cart corral?
Has not heaven an eye? Is all the lightning wasted?
Bad shopping cart behaviour is so rampant and irksome that there is an entire YouTube channel dedicated to pillorying perpetrators. It’s called CartNarcs. It’s run by a YouTuber based in Los Angeles named Sebastian Garrett Davis, who calls himself “Agent Sebastian.” CartNarcs has had more than 90 million views and sells merchandise such as bumper stickers that read: “I Always Return My Shopping Cart.”
The parking lot is a liminal space. The decision whether to return a shopping cart rests on injunctive and descriptive norms. In a 2017 article for Scientific American, anthropologist Krystal D’Costa explained that injunctive norms “drive our responses based on our perception of how others will interpret our actions. This means that we’re inclined to act in certain ways if we think people will think well or think poorly of us.”
Descriptive norms, meanwhile, “are driven by contextual clues. This means we’re apt to mimic behaviours of others – so what we see or hear or smell suggests the appropriate/accepted response or behaviour that we should display.”
That means drivers who see carts strewn about the parking lot, will be more likely to abandon theirs.
It also means drivers who feel they won’t be noticed, will surreptitiously leave their carts out in the parking lot.
D’Costa broke drivers into five categories:
- Returners: Who always return their carts.
- Never returners: People who never return their carts.
- Convenience returners: People who will return their carts when it’s easy. “If they parked close to the receptacle.”
- Pressure returners: People who will return their carts only if the cart attendant is present or if the adjacent car’s owner is present.
- Child-driven returners: These are people with children who view it as a game to return carts, often riding them back to the receptacle or pushing them into the stacked lines.
Unlike D’Costa, I’m not a scientist. I have no idea how anything works. All technology to me is magic. I have the same level of scientific comprehension and understanding as someone who lived in the seventh century.
I believe there are only three categories:
- Never returners. People who never return their carts.
- Convenience returners. People who will return their carts “if they parked close to the receptacle or if they see a cart attendant.”
- Pressure returners. People who will return their carts only if the cart attendant is present or if the adjacent car’s owner is present.
Sooner or later, the temptation to cater to our own individual needs – because we are in a rush or because it’s raining and we don’t wish to get wet – may override our descriptive and injunctive norms.
In this respect, there are only really two types of drivers.
Those who have abandoned their shopping carts in the parking lot.
And those who are going to one day abandon their shopping carts in the parking lot.