Comment by prmoustache 2 days ago
> Larger stores in Sweden also use the coin system, even though as in the Netherlands it feels like use is declining in favor of just unlocked carts.
The coins are so that people put them back in their designated storage area, not to prevent theft. A significant fraction of the population are lazy asshole who tend to leave carts next to where their car was parked instead of walking the 10-20 meters it take to return them.
That is a silly excuse and I say this as a dad. If you don't want to leave the kids for 30 seconds, you return the cart with them.
That's a great idea if your kid is less than 15 pounds, but it's very hard to wrangle a willful 2 or 3 year old the 100 feet across a busy parking lot and back to the car without picking them up which is a monumental task for many people. My wife has this issue because our son is more than 30 pounds which is very heavy for her. Every kid is different and people don't always have the same physical abilities as you do.
How does she gets to the cart in the first place?
Most 2-3y old kids can walk and when my babies where too small to walk I would just put my groceries in the bottom part of the stroller and in an hiking backpack instead of a cart.
So what are the probability that those 4 kids and their parents are all disabled and unable to move to the coral, and how do they manage to get a shopping cart AND be able to do their actual shopping inside the supermarket with that low amount of mobility?
People having newborns typically use baby carriers and strollers and when using the later use the storage space of the stroller to carry a significant amount of groceries. Nobody with a sane mind woud grab 2 newborns in the same arm and throw them in an unsafe shopping cart.
This is even less than statistically insignificant.
Every single person that doesn't return their cart does so out of laziness. Besides just being an asshole, the cart will take a potential parking spot that someone else later needs to move to free up, and worst of all the wind could blow the cart into someone elses car.
Nobody is gonna kidnap her kids as she walks the cart back in less than a minute. It is simply her being a lazy asshole.
> Every single person that doesn't return their cart does so out of laziness. > It is simply her being a lazy asshole.
I can see that this is a very personal issue for you, so I'll just say this: People are complicated, and I would encourage you to have more grace for them. If it bothers you that much to see a cart left by a mom struggling with kids, you might consider offering to return it on her behalf.
Otherwise known as Shopping Cart Theory
As a french living in the Netherlands, the first time I saw this behavior was in the US (SF and LA), it just never happens here, or very marginally.
I have definitely seen it in Europe. France, Spain, Italy and even Switzerland.
Haven't seen that in Switzerland but most place I see where a shopping cart is really warranted (large stores, Ikea, etc.) have covered parking spots instead of open-air (and/or are smaller than those giant parking lot we can see in the US). My hypothesis is that of the panopticon: since those are smaller space that anti-social behavior is way more noticeable and will not be tolerated by peers.
It's not always out of laziness: many times I see moms buckle up their young kids in the car, unload the groceries from the cart, and then be nervous about leaving their kids in order to return the cart. A lot of them will try to park next to the cart return, but that's not always possible.