Travel Blog

Have you ever noticed discarded shopping carts along the road. Or perhaps in a parking lot a long way from any store that might even offer shopping carts? Most people take a car to the store. When they are finished with the cart, put it in the designated space. A few really lazy people will just leave the cart in an open spot beside their car and drive off. These are despicable lazy people. Who will probably die of a heart attack because they do not get any exercise. They cannot even push a cart a few steps to the curb or to the return area.

Discarded Shopping Carts at the Curb

But wait there are worse people. Now at least when a shopper does not return the cart to the store or to designated areas in the parking lot, the store owner still gets his cart back. He has paid a lot of money for these carts. This cost works its way into the cost of the goods we purchase at his store. If a cart is damaged or is taken away from the store then the store owner has lost this investment.

I can understand that if you do not have a car to transport your groceries, that you might want to borrow the cart. Perhaps you do not have enough money for a taxi. You are trying to save every cent that you can. Use the cart to get your groceries home. Then take the time to return the cart. The exercise will do you good and you will reduce the cost to all of us who shop at that store. Instead what many people do is leave these carts in the entry way of apartments. Or worse on the street or on the sidewalk or worse in the ditch.

Costs to the City

These people are lazy and do not care about other people or the way their homes and the area they live in looks. Aside from a messy looking neighborhood, there is an additional cost to leaving these stray carts around. Your local city has to dispatch a crew to pick up these carts and hold them until someone claims then or they go to the dump.

Now we have to pay for the cost of the city crew who make good money to drive a truck out and pick these carts up. Now the writer does not know what the cost of a cart is , nor does he know what the cost of a city crew is, or the cost to store these units. It is probably in access of  a $1000 dollars. You and I have to absorb this cost in the cost of the goods that we buy and the increases taxes to pay for the city workers.

Now just in case you rent and think that you are immune to the increase in city taxes, think again. The landlord must property taxes and he always passes this cost along to the renters in the form of increased rent to the tenants. We all get to pay one way or another for the laziness of a few people.

There is a Solution

Well now various cities are beginning to take action and this writer applauds the initiative.

They are going to charge store owners for the cost of  recovering these shopping carts. Anyone seen discarding a shopping cart in a location where it does not belong is going to be fined.  Once a few people are fined and made an example of hopefully people will get the message and begin returning these expensive shopping carts. This is a silly way to fix a problem but sometimes you just have to treat adults worse than you have to treat children!

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