I saw someone leave their cart next to their car and get back in the car. So I grabbed it and put it in the corral a few spaces away. That person drove back through the parking lot to tell me to "mind my own business". I still get a little schadenfreude about how upset they were over their own conscience and perceived social judgement.

In Europe, you have the incentive of getting a coin back

Why not use the European system where you have to use a coin to unlock the cart from the stack. People are more likely to return the cart if it costs them money if they don’t and if they still leave the cart out some kid or hobo will return it eventually.

The shopping cart theory, as written here, starts as a litmus test for whether a person is capable of self governing and descends into two paths:

1. If you do return the cart you are doing it out of the goodness of your heart and because it is correct; and
2. If you don't you are no better than an animal, a savage, who does what is right only because there is a law in place or you are forced to.

Self-governance: Are you a good person or a monster? There is no middle ground.

Remember that a lot of religious people believe that without written rules of what is right or wrong that we'd all turn into literal murder hobos.

I am glad I live in a place where many grocery stores don't have this problem, because they don't have parking lots, because most of their customers don't even have a car much less would drive it to get groceries if they did. (Yes, I do realize how fortunate I am.)

A long time ago I worked at a grocery store and I preferred it when people didn’t return the carts. Would you rather spend your day gathering carts outside or gathering carts for 10 minutes at a time and then having to deal with customers?

But I gotta get my quid back.

Counterpoint:

The Wholefoods in Redmond, Wa is known as Hellfoods by their employees because of how cold people are there and how overbearing management can be. It also is in one of the most beautiful parts of the country. When I worked there, I love the warm summer evenings when I could go out to the outfield to fetch a cart because I got to be outside and no longer under the micromanagement that is retail.

When I would clock off, sometimes I'd nab a cart and send it out on purpose for the guy behind me to give them an escape.

Every time I fail to return a shopping cart on a beautiful spring day, the grocery store’s Cart Gatherer thanks me kindly and calls, “Thank you kind citizen for giving me leave to leave the hellhole that I was stuck in because the world is filled with assholes who are stealing my job! I want to be in the sunlight! Don’t take that from me!!”

Where I am people do not trust people and shopping carts are coin operated.

What if returning the carts is my usual practice, but there was a time crunch one time and I needed to save myself the extra 30 seconds?

prints this image out a million times and attaches it to every shopping cart I can find