It is uncommon for US grocery stores and supermarkets to leave carts scattered around the parking lot in corrals on purpose. Typically there’s an employee who frequently retrieves all the carts and puts them in a huge covered stall just by the building entrance, so the corrals are often empty. Hell, some stores don’t have corrals at all.
kurcatovium@lemm.ee 7 months ago
European here. I absolutely do NOT understand what everyone here is discussing. When I take the cart at mall, I just simply return it. What’s the biggie? Since I take it from the place closest to my car, I usually return it to the same one where I picked it up. To be honest it never ever even crossed my mind to leave it on the parking spot. Are you, the ones who do this, animals or what?
felbane@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Bennettiquette@lemmy.world 7 months ago
i wonder what the association is between the size of a parking lot and the frequency of its stores buggies not being returned by shoppers. from the pictures of beautiful european cities and towns i’ve seen, walkability seems to be an important development concern. i’m sure not everywhere, but by contrast, many shopping areas in the us are concrete wastelands with stores wrapping around massive, massive parking lots. perhaps parking 1/4 mile away from the store you just left makes it easier for people to excuse themselves from doing the right thing. i guess we don’t have a great track record with doing the right thing in any context though.
Silentiea@lemm.ee 7 months ago
walkability seems to be an important development concern
While true for more modern development, many beautiful, walkable European cities were simply built before cars were around, so it’s not like they made an extra effort to make them walkable, that’s just how things were done
Bennettiquette@lemmy.world 7 months ago
thanks for the insight, which makes sense. stupid cars.
Silentiea@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I mean cars do a lot of good, but yeah. The thing that messed up the US was a policy introduced in some places making a ridiculously high minimum number of parking spaces required for any business. And now, it’s pretty tough to overcome the way that made cities take shape, since now you kind of need to take a car to get places reasonably, meaning places need parking spots to make their customers feel like they can get in… It’s a viscous cycle
rufus@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
Same, same. Maybe one day I’ll travel there and see for myself. Where I live people just walk 10-20m, get a cart, go shopping, put the groceries in the car, walk the 20m again to return it and drive home. No being a prick being involved at the supermarket. However, I’ve observed that some people don’t return their carts at the IKEA.
LastYearsPumpkin@feddit.ch 7 months ago
It’s a very visible thing when people do it. It’s not common where I’m from, but if 1,000 other people go to a store, then just one person leaving a cart in an awkward place pisses off 999 others.
It doesn’t take much to make it seem like a lot of people are being inconsiderate, when it’s much more likely that a small minority of people have a very wide reaching emotional impact.