You Do Not Have Shopping Carte Blanche

Here’s the thing. When I am overworked and overstressed and overtired, I become as easy to push as a shopping cart. Shopping carts, by design, are easy enough to push. Even when a wheel goes wonky.

All four of my metaphorical wheels are wonky at the moment. Yet I’m still managing to return my literal shopping cart to the cart corral. So what excuse do all these other people in the parking lot have? They’re leaving shopping carts abandoned here there and everywhere, as scattered as the thoughts in my head.

These people were clearly able to push the carts this far—while laden with potatoes, mind you—so I see no good reason why the vast majority of them cannot push the unladen carts to a nearby cart corral, instead of converting a simple parking job into a task requiring NASA-level docking precision.

But! Think Global, Act Local, they say. Evidently, out of all the overstressors overtiring and overworking me, this is the one that is pushing me to local action.

Before you back away slowly, let us note that I am not alone in my entirely reasonable frustration at parking lot delinquents: there is, after all, the Shopping Cart Theory.

The Shopping Cart Theory holds that a person’s behavior with shopping cart returns demonstrates their level of self-governance and unmasks their true moral character, which I split into “decent human beings” and “absolute monsters.” The Shopping Cart Theory has its own Wikipedia page that it did not create for itself, owing to its general lack of internet connectivity.

The theory further recognizes that there is no direct benefit for shoppers placing their empty carts in a cart corral. (At least in outdated nations without coin deposits on their carts.) Yet doing so costs them.

Returning the cart to a designated Cart Return Area costs them time: up to several seconds, perhaps even, at one of the larger Walmarts, up to a full minute. It also costs them effort: less exertion than that exerted in arguing with the self-checkout, but effort nonetheless.

Yet returning the cart provides benefits to society that far outweigh these costs. It saves cars from getting dinged and dented. It saves overworked and overtired writers from snapping at strangers later in this piece. It gives the cart-return kids more time to chill outside on their phones. (For what they get paid, good for them.) And, it is the baseline for the right thing to do.

If more of humanity were willing to do the bare minimum for the betterment of the world at large, we would probably be living in Star Trek by now.

Damned to watch some stranger ditch a shopping cart three spaces from a cart corral.

I was sitting in my car, recouping my energy after spending far too long trying to find canned pumpkin. (Despite being a canned vegetable, it lives with baking flour.) I was parked in the spot immediately next to a cart corral. Peripherally, practically unconsciously, I watched out the other side of my car as a fellow shopper unloaded her groceries, parked the cart in the space between us, and sat in her own driver’s seat. Possibly she was overwhelmed from searching for whole-bean coffee, which lives with the bulk foods rather than in the coffee aisle.

The Shopping Cart Theory has its detractors. They say that people may have plenty of valid reasons for abandoning a shopping cart, such as having small children in the car.

This particular shopper did not have any such reasons.

And if she did have children or other mitigating factors—stashed under the back seat and out of sight, say—the rain had cooled the evening to about sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Not too hot to leave children for the twelve seconds it takes to walk three spaces and back again. Nor was she physically incapacitated: she had, after all, pushed her potatoes this far all by herself.

Sometimes I am Zen about that.

Other times, I stop being able to control even myself.

I left my car and flagged her attention. I gestured to her, then to the cart. Raised my eyebrows to ask if I could take it. She rolled her window down.

“Is this your cart?” I asked.

“Well, it was,” she said.

“Oh, so you’re done with it?”

She said she was.

I could have returned the cart quietly and become, by the metrics of the Shopping Cart Theory, a nominee for sainthood.

But there is no justice in sainthood.

“I wasn’t sure,” I said to her, “because you didn’t bother to return it to the cart corral RIGHT THERE.”

She rolled her eyes at me even harder than she rolled up her window.

Now I want it to be known that I returned her cart for her and did not, as I was compelled to do, park her cart immediately behind her car in order to force her to move it. This is because she had no car in front of her and was free to pull forward. If she had abandoned two carts, I would have blocked her from both sides.

To her credit, she did not flip me off as she drove away.

I sat there longer than the cart-return kid, who hung out with his phone in the corral next to me for longer than a legally mandated break. I could not figure out why, out of all the reasons to be an overstressed writer, one person’s failure to live up to basic human decency should derail me so badly.

And I realized it’s not even the behavior: it’s that absolute monsters will not undertake the intensely minimal investment into becoming less horrible than chewing gum on my shoe.

I’d like to take your thoughts in the comments below. When it comes to returning shopping carts under normal operating conditions—e.g., you are not rushing yourself to the hospital due to a critical shopping-related dismemberment—are you:

• a fundamentally lowest-effort decent human being?

• or an absolute monster?

No matter how you choose to answer out loud, karma will know the truth. May it bless you with wobbly wheels in inverse proportion to your decency.

If you are an absolute monster, your penance can begin by becoming a full subscriber to this here Zach Hively and Other Mishaps.

And if you are a decent human being, you know that the absolute monsters won’t, and its up to you to pick up the slack.

A version of this piece appeared previously in the Abiquiú News.