Comment by rockfishroll
Comment by rockfishroll a day ago
I think this solution also misses the fact that certain kinds of people (like bored kids) will walk through fire for a free quarter. It's not even the money, it's the novelty. So if you have a population of people who consider the charge 'the cost of shopping' and don't care enough about 25 cents to return the cart, you still have a whole other population of people who will hunt them down and return them for those people.
As a kid, I almost missed a flight while hunting luggage carts at the airport.
In the local Aldi, it's not bored kids - it's usually unhoused folks who don't particularly have any other way of making money. Pushing carts around the small Aldi parking lot isn't a great way to make a living, but it presumably beats shaking a coffee cup in the middle of an intersection or walking around the entire town collecting plastic bottles or aluminum cans.
I'm sure they don't make much, but it's more than zero.