After I’ve loaded the groceries from the cart into my car, I often face the irritating realization that I have once again parked near the entrance rather than near the cart return, as I should have done.
But for whatever reason, as soon as I’m done with the cart, I suddenly have this weird sense of feeling entitled to simply discard it like litter, even sometimes wanting to blame the store for my own miscalculation. “They should have convenienced me better with more returns! Who do they think they are forcing me to walk an extra forty feet?” This despite having just walked over a hundred time this far with no complaint at all while shopping.
It’s at this moment that I decide to be civilized rather than selfish. Sure, I’d rather just leave the cart in the middle of the parking lot or hang it over a landscaped curb. But am I really so sniveling and lazy that I can’t walk a few yards to put something back where it belongs?
It is precisely the absurdity of this question that confronts me every time I see a parking lot littered with the carts of my fellow citizens who apparently couldn’t pass even so basic a moral test. In all honesty, if there’s a more reliable indicator of the moral development of a community than the ratio of carts returned properly to those not, I’m unable to imagine what it would be.
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