Over here in Germany using a shopping cart "costs" between 50 Cents and 2 €. You have to put a coin in them to release the chain by which they are attached to eachother. Of course when you return the cart and close the lock you get your coin back.
Little metal plates without monetary value but still the right size are common marketing gifts by companies and organizations yet they still provide mostly the same unconscious effect of "I want my coin back".
Of course there are also people who use little gadgets to unlock the carts without putting anything in but I wouldnt know about such things...
That's one of the things Aldi brought with them when they came over to the US. I've always thought it was a pretty cool idea, though as inflation keeps going the 25-cent lock-in becomes less and less of a motivator. Maybe a good reminder, though.
We have these at airports in the US for luggage carts - though they don’t return any of your money if you bring the cart back they l’ve seen, so it doesn’t do much to modify behavior.
Putting a quarter into a cart is a thing in Canada but it's only ever at the low income grocery stores. The ritzier stores use a locking mechanism to lock the wheels if they leave the parking lot.
Want to know a sad irony? The cart returns are usually really far from the handicap spots. Parking is close to the store. But the returns are halfway down the aisle.
If everyone put them away, the person hired to put the carts back would lose their job. Yes, some used to hire more. Plus, supermarkets may consider having more than 1 trolley area that isn't miles away from the cars parked there so they can ram more cars in there.
Could be kinder on folks with health issues that don't have a blue badge....
"I'm a job creator!" I yell, as I shit on the floor of the DMV. "If everyone did this they would have to hire more janitors!" The police drag me away. "I'm opening new avenues for employment in our police department!"
Just in case you forgot the /s tag, that person's job isn't to collect the carts scattered across the parking lot, it's to move the carts from the cart area to inside the store. The right way to handle the lack of cart areas isn't to make the workers job harder, it's to complain to the store.
If the grocery store didn't have to spend money putting carts away, the same person could be working inside the store where it's warm and dry. Shitty people are preventing everyone else from better service and/or lower prices.
So long as politicians are all painted with the same negative brush, there's no room for anyone with a genuine interest in improving things. There are some truly great, caring people in politics working hard to do the right thing. It's not their fault the public keeps voting for assholes.
Don't forget how many apartment buildings are owned by corporate landlords though. Western Canada has a huuuge problem with the slumlord billionaires at Mainstreet and others.
The out-of-date data I can find has 35% of BC apartments as investor-owned.
I guess that's likely the difference. With the big company owned apartments you usually deal with a super intendant or building manager instead of the landlord directly. So the renter is seen as a faceless number rather than an actual person to the owners you are paying money to. There's a lack of empathy towards the renter.
Stole whose money? My money? My stove broke, they replaced it, pest issue, they paid for the exterminator, roof leaking, they paid for it to be fixed, many other examples but you get the idea. I didn't pay utilities in some places. I've had bad landlords and I moved house because of them and didn't do them any favours when I left. The good ones I made sure I was a good tenant for.
I think a lot of renters don't understand how expensive owning a place is with upkeep. We wouldn't be able to replace a furnace or roof repair and all that jazz in our income bracket.
If you are going to make me put a coin into a cart because you don't trust me to be an adult and tidy up after myself without being nannied, then I am going to do my damndest to bypass your lock and leave a mess out of spite.
In the shops where I am trusted and not required to pay a coin (I never even carry cash these days) I tidy up because that is the decent thing to do.
Yeah, might just wanna remember that the people that clean up your mess aren't the same ones who put a coin lock on the cart.
Maybe you don't care, but your rage isn't really being channeled in a way that gets vengeance on the right people. It just hurts your working class allies.
Maybe where you live you are an outlier and not representative of the average person behavior, like you are a better person than the average. At least where I leave there is no coin system and people leave carts all around. I suspect that is even worse than what I see because there are employees always gathering carts.
This is a severe attack against people who don't put their carts away.
Their actions just leave a small inconvenience for other people .... their actions don't wholesale destroy the lives of entire groups of people or cause outright war, genocide, death or destruction.
People who don't mind making the world a little bit worse for literally everyone else if it saves them some small amount of effort are the real monsters, because they think they're not.
You are right of course, but that's part of the joke. I think it's provokes such a viseral response because it's directly "against" the reader, not many of us can claim to be directly impacted by genocide for example, even though it's way worse.
lol ... I find it humorous that I'm getting downvoted for saying it ... if only people would get as upset about people putting away shopping carts as they do actual real world genocide.
Everyone agrees you should put your cart away, but there is no reward for doing so and no punishment for not doing it. Therefore it says a lot about the individual if they will "do the right thing" just because it makes things slightly better for other people, or if they won't bother doing a simple act in order to avoid inconveniencing someone else if they aren't forced to do so.
For such a simple act, it shows an extreme amount of selfishness to not do it.
Funny I never see such hatred for people who leave their garbage on movie theatre seats or not clearing their trays at fast food places.
Some people have disabilities and sometimes it's just tough enough to shop and they are too tired or worn out by the end of their monthly shopping trip to bring the cart to the cart shed. I feel like everyone shitting on people leaving carts out of the cart shed are fully able bodied healthy young people who will one day do the thing they are complaining about, and realise they were being wieners about it. It's not the end of the world to leave your cart 10 metres from the shed.