What does a shopping cart have to say about anyone? It turns out, a lot! In my search to better understand humanity through Existential Economics, I’ve come across something incredibly puzzling. For now, let’s simply refer to this particular puzzle as The Shopping Cart Conundrum.
When was the last time you were in a grocery store or shopping center parking lot and encountered a lone shopping cart. Perhaps it was off to the side, on the edge of the curb, maybe even in the grassy strip between rows. Or maybe it was taking up three premium parking spaces: a handicapped space, one for pregnant mothers, and that one spot near the entrance that regular people can use. In any case, did it make you question the moral aptitude of the person who left it there? I had my own assumptions about the people who do such things, but little did I know about the truth.
Six years ago, I began a research project on The Shopping Cart Conundrum. My hypothesis was that people who return their carts, either to the store, or to the shopping cart return corral, are socially responsible, and worthy of having the right to vote. What better place to start social research than in the EU, where socialism is flourishing. I observed many parking lots, and as expected, 99.987823815% of the time, shoppers returned their carts. The one person that didn’t was actually in the process of robbing the store and took the cart with him. I was satisfied that peer pressure and societal expectations drove the good behavior.
Shopping Cart Conundrum Deepens
Upon closer investigation, I learned that Europeans do things a bit differently. In order to get a cart, first the customer had to deposit a 1 Euro coin in the cart handle to unlock it from the queue. The coin can only be released by returning it to the queue and connecting it to the next cart. So, the socialists aren’t returning carts for the common good. Back home in America I monitored parking lots across the country. I was not surprised to find a higher rate of cart abandonment. But I was surprised by who was leaving the carts. It wasn’t the “selfish capitalists”, rather it was primarily people who identify as selfless socialists.
In the end, I’m still left with the conundrum: why aren’t the people who claim to care about everyone returning their carts. And why are the people who are typically motivated by material gain the ones who invariably return them? It was my hope that the shopping cart test would be the ultimate measure of social responsibility. I envisioned developing a parking lot monitoring network that used cameras and facial recognition to identify good citizens. That data could be fed into voter registration databases and remove miscreants from the voter rolls.
Unfortunately, my research has come to an abrupt halt because the sponsor, Dominion Voting Systems, wasn’t happy with the results. Until such time as I can find new funding for my research, the Shopping Cart Conundrum remains just that.