The One Place

Getting it right

Doing the right thing is never easy. Mostly because the “right thing” is often subjective and rarely concrete. Books have been written on the topic. Many, many books. Ethicists and philosophers and deep thinkers aplenty have engaged in drawn out discussions about how to tell whether actions are morally correct.

Another challenge comes from the inconclusive nature of the results. Even when trying to make good choices and do the morally appropriate thing, most often the results are unknown.

Except at the grocery store with shopping carts. It is the one place I’m certain of my actions, and where I can take pride in going above and beyond.

Giving the people the benefit of the doubt is something I take pride in. I really try my best not to judge. My darling wife will often remark that to a fault I assume people are well meaning and have good intentions. To me, this is a good quality, but it certainly can lead to bad outcomes. However, even my benevolence is tested in situations like that pictured above. I realize not everyone will take shopping cart parking lot etiquette as seriously as I do. I understand, though don’t love, when people pull the cart up onto the curb so that only the back tires are in the spot. But this…dare I say, travesty. I cannot abide this. A cart left to completely make a parking space inhospitable and essentially — what are we even doing here? That is a whole different level of moral decision making than what I typically engage with.

Yes, I parked there anyway, mostly because I had already committed to the spot when I saw the cart. But also to prove a point.* Even though I knew that when I brought that cart inside, it would look as though I am terrible at parking my car. Which, admittedly, I am.

*To be honest, I also knew there was a potential newsletter to write if I pulled into the space. Yes, I am now observing potential newsletter content in real time.

My first job in high school was working at a grocery store. Perhaps this is why I have always considered shopping cart actions to be so critical. Clearly this is not the most important stuff in the world. When I worked at…Price Chopper, I think (Mom, feel free to correct me in the comments) I had four main jobs. Bagging groceries, returning items that weren’t purchased to the shelves, cleaning up spills, and yes, collecting the shopping carts from the parking lot and bringing them back into the store. I was in line to be trained as a cashier but I left for the more glamorous job of — checks notes — working in a nursing home kitchen.

I’m not sure when exactly I started my strict shopping cart code of behavior. Best guess is sometime when living in Pennsylvania for my first job out of college. At some point, I did a calculus in my head and made a decision. No, collecting carts in the parking lot is not the hardest job in the world, and bringing in extra cart in the little corral thing, or even left up on the curb like described above, is not going to make that job demonstrably harder. This was a still a tangible thing I could do requiring very little extra effort or burden that makes the day a tiny fraction easier for someone working at the grocery store, and possibly for the customer coming in behind me.

For that reason, every time I am done with a cart I walk it all the way back to the store. It takes maybe 90 seconds. Ninety seconds where I get a little exercise and where I get the self satisfaction of knowing I did the most I could in this specific situation. Sometimes I will even hearken back to my youth and grab a stray cart or two as I go. I admit, I typically don’t bring them all the way back to the store. Leaving them safely off to the side near the entranceway, or back in whatever collection exists in front of the store suffices to sate my need for performance of good deeds.

Yes, sometimes this means leaving a child unattended in the car for that minute or so. Although the calculus has drastically changed now that the boys are older. Now it’s often part of a multi-layered negotiation with Declan as to where he wants to bring the cart — mostly in the hope that whatever he decides will lead to him giving an employee a hi-five. Or I will employ both of them in the “fun” task of collecting random carts that have been left around the parking lot and crashing them into each other in the corrals. If that’s the reward that helps make the shopping trip manageable, I call that a win.

This is something I repeat often here at Chaos Theory, but I really try not to be preachy or suggest I have answers. People make their own choices, and should do what they think is necessary given time, circumstances, and situation. If you think bringing the cart back to the corral is enough, that’s fine. If you are comfortable moving it out of a space up on the curb, that’s up to you. I do think leaving a cart to block (or at least make things difficult) a parking space is an inexplicable lack of courtesy for others, but I don’t know what was happening with that person, and I will give the benefit of the doubt.

All that said, my recommendation is to just give it a try. You really won’t miss those 90 seconds over the course of the day, and I suspect you will enjoy the feeling that comes with the rare success of knowing you’re doing something that eases another’s burden even ever-so-slightly. The water is fine here in my pool of self-superiority — come on in!