Honestly, that article is the kind of “scholarship” that makes people think sociology is the study of the obvious.
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That could be, except that vulture parking occurs all over the country during all kinds of weather.
I think it’s more laziness than anything else.
It’s a weird divide. On the one hand, you have these people who run marathons and have those stupid 26.2 stickers on their cars, and then you have the people who don’t want to walk twenty feet further than they need to, or climb a flight of stairs. What’s weirder is that there’s almost certainly some overlap between the two groups.
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Ok - my misinference. Apologies. But the areas where one sees trolleys in the wild do correlate (even if only anecdotally) to - well, I don’t know what to call it without starting another ‘debate’ - ‘income levels’ shall we say? (‘Social attitudes’ might be too inflammatory by being too much of a simplification/generalisation.) And when it is a whole pound for a trolley in UK, that is an incentive to put it back properly and not leave it lying about, especially if you are shopping at the discount stores for strong personal economic reasons. I was intrigued by the idea that if it is only 25c in USA, kids think it is worth offering a service to do it for you and 25c is seen as a sum that can more easily be written off. Never been asked that by kids hanging around UK supermarkets, I’d guess they’d not get many takers at £1, but maybe I shop in the wrong places.
Of course if you want to steal a trolley for a good reason, £1 is maybe still a very good price!
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Yeah, you can buy slugs that fit the chain gizmos, but they cost a pound. You’d make a killing selling them for 50p though.
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Yep. Lazy, self-centered and thoughtless. It’s always wonderful to drive up to a seemingly open spot in a very busy supermarket lot… then find that the spot has a cart clogging it. So nice.
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I am reminded of the UK guy sent to India for a year to help train people in a new offshore call centre for his company. Kept getting his own printout from the printer / print room just like back in the UK. Was told to stop it as this was THAT guy’s job, and he would be out of work if everyone got their own printout.
Economic productivity is a weird thing. 
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Thank you for your well considered response.
But… see, I cut out the reinforcement middle man entirely.
I would say that I behave the way that i do because it allows me to be myself, not because it makes me feel better.
Also, if I am deeply delusional I accept that as my natural state. I suspect that those that don’t (accept that about themselves) are just adding another layer.
I’m kind of hit & miss with returning carts if there’s no returns near the bike racks. A dollar is no where near enough incentive to find a dropoff and mess around with the carts when I’m carrying 40 pounds of groceries.
It has little enough value that a twenty-five cent coin is generally enough to compel people to return them.
I can’t speak to your financial situation, but if I got home one day and found that a quarter was missing from my pocket, I wouldn’t particularly notice the loss of that money. Nor, it follows, would the equivalent time and attention be any particular sacrifice.
It’s a restaurant’s job to provide the service of keeping the floors clean. That doesn’t make dumping the remnants of your glass of whatever you’re drinking onto the floor as you’re leaving anything other than a dick move.
Of course it isn’t a “noble social sacrifice.” It’s common courtesy. It’s no more a “noble social sacrifice” than saying “please” is when requesting assistance with something, or saying “thank you” to express appreciation for assistance provided.
The way you’re talking, it’s like “returning a cart” is something worth a lot more than 25 cents.
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Ah, I see what you’re saying now. Not that you return the carts because doing so or not doing so makes you think differently about how you see yourself, but rather that you return the carts because you see yourself as someone who returns carts.
I’d almost want to reduce that down to “force of habit,” but that might be the same kind of gross oversimplification that I’m accusing the article of. Perhaps better would be Steven King’s description of the gunslinger as “a man who might straighten bad pictures in strange hotel rooms.”
I’m not sure how that would fit into the article; perhaps as another thing, beyond self-interest, that prevents people from returning carts: the fact that we already mostly see ourselves as someone who returns carts and someone who doesn’t: kind of an inertia to be overcome in changing people from one group to the other.
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Wait… is this one of those compound German words!? 
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Back when my kid was a tot, I always tried to park next to or close enough to the corral, so I could be right there and still put the cart away.
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My take: I don’t really care. In fact, I think the only people who might seriously care, besides the anthropologists, are the overworked store personnel who have to risk life and limb to get them back to the store’s building.
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Well, the people whose job it is to round up carts still have to take them from the corral and move them back to the front of the building. Or in the case of one place I shop, to take them from where they are and return them to the corrals (as they are kept there instead of at the front of the store.
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Not all sociology is so obvious. But sometimes, it helps to actually systematically understand what seems intuitive and obvious. Just because we all know something is true doesn’t mean we really know all the reasons WHY it’s true and that’s the interesting and sometimes enlightening part.
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And stores should do exactly that, so people can decide the value for themselves rather than getting self-righteous online social warriors to defend their cost-saving policies as some kind of “common courtesy”.
If only this was a relevant comparison, you would win the day sir! But intentionally going to extra effort to create a mess is not at all the same as being expected to spend extra effort to resolve a mess created by a store’s service to you.
It sounds as though you are unaware that shopping baskets were invented specifically to increase commerce, and as a tool created by stores to increase profits they are the store’s responsibility.
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I can understand the attitude “I won’t do it because there’s someone else who’s job it is to do it”. I cannot fathom the “I won’t do it so as to provide job security for those that are paid to do it”.
It always struck me as a an excuse for lazy, entitled behavior. And a poor one at that.
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