Many actually do! There are some stores that position baskets inside the shopping space just for this case. Easy way to make an additional sale.
Just do what everyone else does and steal someone else’s cart.
Funny, just yesterday I had seen that in a big drug store for the first time (consciously) and was impressed of that business smartness.
Bunnings does this. Unfortunately they also don’t have any near the entrance so you end up snark hunting
I keep a couple foldable reuseable bags in my purse for such occasions
Publix has this. I always appreciate it.
In love with it
Mine does. One at the meat market, one by dairy, and one in the exact middle of the store
Carts are provided (and comically oversized today) because it gets people to buy more than if they looked full earlier:
https://proceedings.emac-online.org/pdfs/A2024-119348.pdf
(there are much older studies than that confirming the same thing)
Still, right tool/right job
Yep.
I hate that removing the smaller carts means I have to drag around a big cart.
I work from a shopping list - I don’t buy what’s not on the list.
The affordability crisis took care of thay for me. I put my cereal and sour cream and can of soup in the basket, check my credit care balance, pay my $50, and leave without needing a bag
So, is the sour cream for the cereal, the soup, or just for eating out of the container with a spoon?
These are the kinds of systemic changes that working class families can feel!
Lowe’s does this and it’s quite clever. Maybe you came for one thing and saw some other stuff. Having a cart right there makes that extra sale where otherwise you may be too lazy to go get a cart.
It’s also nice for the employees not to have to return every cart to the front of a large store. I always filled those places when I ended up with an empty cart.
My preferred local one does. I love it.
Some do.
They do – – they are the carts abandoned by those people who have the “oh, I guess I didn’t need a whole cart for this one thing“ moments
I basically never see abandoned carts, but I have returned to where I parked my cart to find it gone. I’m sure no one is taking it maliciously, but I am always just an aisle over and I parked it there because the aisle I need is jam packed with shoppers already.
Get a cart and a hand basket. Or, put an item in your empty cart and remove it when you return.
The unwritten rules of the cart
I believe, that would only really be a thing in the US? In most other countries, we have coin locks on the shopping carts, so you can only get them from the corral by inserting a coin into the shopping cart, and you only get your coin back when you return the shopping cart to the corral…
I’ve never seen this happen, I live in the US. I see abandoned carts in the parking lot not far from the return area all the time, but not just randomly in the store.
Do they have most robust locks? We have those at Aldi, they’re also all broken.
Where I live, I’d say there’s on average one cart with a broken lock per corral. But they’re also usually at the front of the corral, so you still end up with them relatively often…
Never seen a coin lock in NZ.
We’re not “most other countries”, though. Sample size one.
Yeah, I might specifically remember the US not usually having them, because they invented/popularized shopping carts, which always feels kind of backwards that they’re using a simpler version.
Wikipedia has at least some info on the distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_cart#Deposits
(And I can confirm that here in Germany, you practically cannot find shopping carts without coin locks. I’m not sure, if I’ve ever seen one TBH.)
To increase your sample size, these seem to be rare where I am in western Canada. The only store I can think of that used to have them removed them at least a decade ago.
