These Abandoned Carts Have Costco Shoppers Seeing Red

Whenever we have to head to the grocery store for a big shopping trip, most of us are probably pretty grateful to have shopping carts readily available. These handy and convenient carts make it very easy to grab all of what we need in one simple trip — no matter how heavy or unwieldy the products we are buying may be. But that wasn't always the case. Wheeled shopping carts were not invented until the mid-1930s, when a shop owner named Sylvan N. Goldman, who ran a chain of Humpty Dumpty grocery stores, realized that people tended to stop shopping when their hand-held baskets became too heavy, via America Comes Alive. Hoping to encourage people to buy more goods, he came up with the idea of adding wheels to the baskets, thus making it easier and more convenient to purchase more items.

These days, it seems that many people take this invention for granted. While most people probably don't think twice about grabbing a shopping cart when they enter the store, some people also don't think too much about where they deposit the cart after they have finished with it either. Although most stores have conveniently placed cart corrals throughout the parking lot, so they can be easily collected without customers having to go back inside, some shoppers still leave their carts haphazardly strewn throughout the parking lot rather than returning them, a practice that tends to annoy not just store employees, but other customers as well.

One shopper took to Reddit to rant about this particular pet peeve after a recent trip to their local Costco. "Lazy people at my local Costco," u/LastRebel66 captioned photos they took of multiple abandoned shopping carts that had been carelessly left in the middle of the parking lot, rather than returned to the corrals. While some people might feel that it is the store's employees' jobs to collect the carts from outside, no matter where they may have been left, most shoppers seem to feel that not returning the cart to the convenient corrals is lazy and rude. Not only does it make the employees' jobs more difficult, it can also block available parking spaces and make the whole shopping experience inconvenient for other customers.

Many fellow Reddit users were quick to agree that seeing these carelessly abandoned carts was pretty infuriating. "I think the people who do this should be banned from Costco," u/eatingpotatochips replied, saying, "Whether a person returns a cart properly is, in my opinion, a good proxy for whether or not they're a good person." Another user agreed, noting, "I do detest lazy cart ditchers," while u/j_grouchy exclaimed, "And the cart corral was right there!" So although sometimes we might be tempted to abandon our shopping carts when we are in a rush, returning them takes just a few extra moments, and both employees and other shoppers will definitely appreciate it.