Here (central Ontario, Canada), there’s generally a split along store fanciness (or “class”, but that’s not quite right). The better looking/stocked/pricier the store, the LESS likely you’ll have leave a quarter deposit.
And yes, they work. We used to have a long strip mall with a Walmart and a FreshCo (lower “class”, cheaper, better “ethnic” section, etc); the blue Walmart ones were non-deposit, the black/green FreshCo required deposit; the lot was a sea of blue carts. I found it amazing how little we’d sell our service for.
Just recently noticed a trend: most stores that had deposit carts also had storage sheds every few rows, so you rarely had to travel >~20m to return the cart for your quarter. Two local stores have removed the sheds, so you have to return them to the front door area. I’m keeping an eye out to see if there is an increase in abandoned carts, and possibly an increase in the deposit. Which will certainly raise many hackles.
EDIT: on reflection, “rental” is wrong. “Deposit” is correct. Why, yes, I have too much time on my hands…
Chaotic Frozen: returning the shopping cart to the nearest snowbank, to be discovered in the spring (or maybe early summer, depending on how much snow falls during the winter) in one or more pieces thanks to the plows.
The Chaotic Good one is weird. If you launch it into the corral but don’t stack it, you don’t get your coin back. In a way, you’re donating the coin to someone else to clean up your cart. The whole point of the neat Lawful Evil stack is of course that you still get most of the coins back.
Personally, I’d consider blocking a parking space to be the worst offense. Giving it to the poor sounds kind of Good, despite it being illegal. Wouldn’t that be Chaotic Good?
The article did mention a category of people who return the carts as part of some game with their children:
Child-Driven Returners. These are people with children who view it as a game to return carts, often riding them back to the receptacle or pushing them into the stacked lines.
I read that and thought what about the people without children who do the same thing for the same reasons?
Not me of course. I am a serious and sensible grown-up who never uses the shopping cart as a kind of scooter/skateboard
