A Fed-Up Costco Worker Is Furious About How People Treat The Carts

Costco counts over 116 million people among its members (per Zippia) as of May 2022. With that many people making trips to its stores, there's sure to be a wide spectrum of customer behavior. And one Costco employee appears to not be a fan of the actions of some of those shoppers when it comes to the carts the stores provide.

Customers' treatment of shopping carts isn't the only thing that can frustrate Costco employees. In 2020, Yahoo! Life shared that Costco employees bemoan other things like customers coming in right before closing time, leaving frozen items out in the open, and breaking or spilling an item without notifying a Costco employee. Those are all understandable grievances as most people would probably be irritated by being in the Costco employees' shoes in those instances. One of the biggest scandals to ever hit Costco also involved employee satisfaction, as a deaf woman who worked for the company sued and won over Costco's failure to accommodate her disability (per the Miami New Times). The experiences recounted by another Costco employee on Reddit detail another customer behavior flaw.

In August 2022, u/Rocko52 took to the r/Costco subreddit and started a new thread with their rant, entitled "Why for the love of god do you treat carts like trash cans." U/Rocko52 griped, "I doubt this is anyone particular enough to be on a Costco subreddit, but jesus christ are people disgusting. The amount of revolting trash I find in carts every hour, every day for months is enough for one lifetime. From raw fish, to used diapers, to condoms, to uncountable amounts of crushed food samplings, to wipes melted into mush in the rain, to half eaten food court s— it's enough to drive someone mad...There's gotta be like 50 trash cans in the whole store too."

Commenters on the thread shared their unpopular opinions about Costco customers, too. One Redditor stated they had found used diapers in the carts, while u/Wild-Plate-6298 also said discarded food samples were common occurrences in their experience. The original poster also added used clothing to the list of things they have found in carts later in the thread, suggesting people are essentially using the carts as a way to dump unwanted items.

Many of the irritations for Costco workers like this could be alleviated if more customers put themselves in those workers' shoes, lest something unfortunate happen to them, like the shoppers who were recently trapped in elevators at the big-box retailer (per Commercial Observer).