Hello and welcome to “What Really Grinds My Gears,” a weekly column poking fun at the everyday nuisances we all seem to create for each other because well, we just can’t help it, we’re only human, right?
It really grinds my gears when unbelievably lazy individuals leave shopping carts in random places around the parking lot. I will never understand the ridiculous and inexplicable motive, or lack thereof, behind leaving a shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot, or anywhere other than the designated shopping cart receptacle. It’s one of those things that people really have no excuse not to do, I mean, there are cart returns all over parking lots with big signs overhead reading, RETURN CARTS HERE. In bigger parking lots there’s a cart return probably every 30 feet, and if you’re lucky, or unlucky depending on how you look at it, you can usually park very close, if not right next to one of the receptacles. The misplacement of shopping carts has proven to be a danger to vehicles, as well as a danger to elderly folk and very small children. Shopping carts have wheels attached to the bottom, making them moving inanimate objects that are also quite heavy, thus giving the shopping carts a potentially high velocity. The speed these things can pick up, mixed with the heavy metal material and sharp corners that make up a shopping cart, make one for one lethal, mobile death trap. At the very least stray shopping carts have the potential and power to damage the paint job of one’s vehicle.
Of course grocery stores and shopping centers have employees that wrangle the carts day in and day out, but the inexcusable act of pathetic lethargy I speak of is simply unnecessary. It is our civic duty as shoppers and participants in the free enterprise system to walk an extra three feet to return our shopping carts to the proper repositories. Most people would benefit from returning their shopping carts; it would be a hard day’s work and a job well done, an act everyone can feel proud about, especially since not returning your cart makes you look like a real tool. One could feel pride in doing the righteous thing and doing their part to keep our elderly and our young safe from the threat of a lone, fast-moving, pointy shopping cart.
I have such a tremendous beef with people who don’t put their carts away correctly, and with the carts themselves, because just the other day my Chevy Malibu was the victim of one of these violent and unnecessary shopping cart accidents I have been ranting about. I was leaving my local grocery store, King Soopers, with my purchase, (coffee creamer and Redi-Whip), and while walking to my car I watched one of the abandoned carts roll towards my car, with some speed I might add, and BAM, the shopping cart collided with my innocent parked car. The accident left unsightly scratches on the rear end of my car, which I had just taken through the car wash, of course. Now every time I walk up to my car from behind, I am reminded of how unnecessary the whole ordeal was and that if someone had just done their part to make this world a better place, then I wouldn’t have that little cluster of scratches and scuff marks in my vehicle’s attractive dark-grey colored paint. I guess it could have been worse though, the shopping cart could have run over a toddler or knocked over an elderly citizen walking with a cane, breaking brittle, fragile bones.
The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission published on their website that “an annual average of 21,600 children 5 years old and younger were treated in US hospital emergency rooms for shopping cart injuries during the years 1985-1996.” That is a real statistic, which can be found at www.cpsc.gov, in case you can’t believe there are actually that many injuries to small children caused by shopping carts. I myself was a little surprised, that’s a lot of injuries. But seriously, it must take like, one extra joule of expended energy to walk to the nearest cart return receptacle and slide the cart in. That extent of laziness is just disgraceful. We aren’t sloths, we’re human beings.
So, in an attempt to understand what the appeal of just randomly leaving a shopping cart in the parking lot, I conducted my own research. I went back to King Soopers, bought a few groceries, pushed my cart to my car, and then just left it there. I felt ashamed. I felt lazy. I felt guilty; primarily because an elderly man walking past me gave me a really dirty look… In all reality though, that dirty look from the elderly man could have been from any number of things, like indigestion or osteoporosis. Anyway, I just couldn’t do it. I got out of my car and put the shopping cart in a return receptacle, where it belongs. The extra effort I put in felt good. Now that I know the statistics of injuries to small children caused by shopping carts, I probably saved a life that day. I’m a hero! We can all be heroes, if we just return our shopping carts.
The next time I witness a person irresponsibly leave their shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot, I plan on giving them a very dirty look, like that elderly man gave me, in hopes of initiating a feeling of guilt and possibly encouraging that person to put their cart where it belongs. Or maybe I will repeat the statistics of shopping cart-related injuries from the year 1985 to the offender and hopefully they will realize the dire necessity to return shopping carts and will join me in the fight to save lives, and just put shopping carts away. But alas, most people don’t really care about shopping carts, so I’m not expecting a whole lot.
