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Why Don’t People Return Their Shopping Carts? A (Somewhat) Scientific Investigation - by Hannah B. Waldfogel - Behavioral Scientist

behavioralscientist.org · 1,866 words · saved by 1 readers

Iarrived on the scene early one Saturday. The suspects were long gone, but the evidence remained. One cart was wedged into a curb, another sat toppled over in a parking spot, a third drifted like a metal tumbleweed across the lot. My question: Why don’t people return their shopping carts? I’m a psychologist who has spent the past decade studying how we think about our own behavior in relation to others. Perhaps the choice to not return a shopping cart seems trivial, but what we do with our cart says a lot about how we think about others and what we believe we owe one another (or don’t). I’ve never understood why people don’t put their carts away. In high school, I worked as a shopping cart attendant at my local grocery store, shepherding carts across the lot. Since then, for reasons I can’t fully explain, people’s failure to return their carts bothers me more than it probably should, with every trip to the grocery store a reminder of the special kind of havoc humanity is capable of. Th

I arrived on the scene early one Saturday. The suspects were long gone, but the evidence remained. One cart was wedged into a curb, another sat toppled over in a parking spot, a third drifted like a metal tumbleweed across the lot. My question: Why don’t people return their shopping carts? I’m a psychologist who has spent the past decade studying how we think about our own behavior in relation to others. Perhaps the choice to not return a shopping cart seems trivial, but what we do with our cart says a lot about how we think about others and what we believe we owe one another (or don’t). I’ve

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