Of all of the problems facing our country and the world at large, perhaps one of the most important and pressing to deal with is the persistent laziness of shopping cart users.  Every time I visit Walmart or Target or any store that uses shopping carts, the parking lot is a minefield of discarded shopping carts strewn chaotically about the parking spaces and basically everywhere but the designated shopping cart return aisles.

Committing this heinous act is not only a sign of laziness, it is dangerous. These shopping carts have four wheels (unless you’re at Walmart, then it can vary) and given high wind conditions, can fly into cars at high speeds.

I might be making a big deal out of this, but it deserves to be highlighted. If people don’t make a big deal out of it, change will never happen. These people need to be called out. You are lazy. You bothered to walk around a store for enough time to fill up a shopping cart, circling the aisles for possibly an hour or more, but you can’t be bothered to walk the ten extra steps to put your shopping cart away? Suddenly, inexplicably, you become physically exhausted to the point where walking ten feet is impossible. This can no longer stand.

I have seen efforts from grocery stores to prevent such incidents from happening. Aldi has introduced carts that require a quarter to use. The problem with these is that people decide that a quarter is not worth walking back to the cart aisle to return it. And so their efforts are in vain.

And for those of you who believe that not returning your cart is “ensuring jobs” for the workers at the store, that’s ridiculous. The idea is that you are creating more work for the employees to do, therefore ensuring that they stay hired. Let’s apply that logic to something else. Say you wanted to create more jobs for janitors at a school. The best way to do this is to leave your trash everywhere for them to pick up, and create as big of a mess as possible so that they have the opportunity to clean it up, right? They should be thanking you for being such a slob because you gave them work to do, right? Of course not! I guarantee they wouldn’t be grateful if they had to scrape your spaghetti off the quad floor every day. And grocery store employees aren’t glad they get to spend their day gathering lazily discarded carts. They’re probably high school students like you just trying to earn minimum wage. Give them a break. 

The overarching issue here is that if you aren’t willing to do such a simple task to prevent damage and inconvenience for others, you certainly won’t be willing to sacrifice much else for the good of the rest of the world at the expense of your personal convenience. You are willing to make the world a worse place in favor of selfish desires. If this attitude continues spreading, imagine what the world will become. No one is willing to do anything as simple as taking a few steps to benefit anyone but themselves. The lowering of society’s standards is falling, and shopping carts are just the beginning. So help save the world. Return your shopping carts