Today I noticed...Shopping Carts

 What one does with a shopping cart when the shopping is done tells a lot about a person.

Did you know that there is all sort of research about shopping carts being returned. There have been studies about whether a person returns the shopping cart or pushes it to the cart corral or whether there is an incentive for returning a shopping cart or not makes a difference or what other factors might feed into why or when a person returns a shopping cart. There is even an established shopping cart theory. Who knew?!

Something I was reading referenced The Shopping Cart Theory. Then, I noticed that there were some other links offered regarding the psychology around the return of shopping carts. There's even a YouTube channel devoted to the concept. (Is there just a YouTube video for anything and everything?) A research and teaching fellow even shared her hours of research findings and categorizing of excuses. 

What prompted me to even scan through the links shared above is what I observed while sitting in our local grocery store parking lot when I went to pick up my prescription the other day and had to wait for it. Most of the people I saw either returned their cart inside to the front of the store or left it in the corral provided there in the parking lot. A few, however, did not.

One young woman wrestled with one cart loaded with groceries and another filled with three very small children. She loaded the groceries into the back of her SUV, dragged the cart of children behind her as she returned the empty cart to the corral, returned to her car wrestling with her children and got them squared away in their car safety seats, then, left the empty cart propped up on the closest curb. She let out a huge sigh, climbed into the driver's seat and drove away. 

A guy who had a couple of boxes of baked goods, a case of water, and a couple of six-packs of soft drinks rushed to his vehicle, loaded his wares into the trunk of his car, and shoved the cart across the empty spaces nearby. Then, he proceeded to climb into the driver's seat, back out of the space, narrowly missing another shopper with a cart and sped away.

A third patron emptied the cart, pushed it over to rest against the bumper of a car nearby, climbed into his vehicle and drove away.

Then, I saw a young person - probably a teenager - pause and help a woman with a cane load a couple of bags of groceries and a plant into the back seat of her car before pushing her cart into the store.

I only spent about fifteen minutes observing the shopping cart rodeo in the parking lot of our local grocery store but I really did think that each person I saw told me a little bit about themselves during that short timeframe. It made me think about the way I want to behave the next time I'm in the parking lot and what I will do when I see a loose cart there.