I Go On the Internet
On shopping carts and society
I go on the internet and there’s a video of a woman sitting in her car, talking to her phone’s camera. She's talking about how when she’s done at the grocery store, she doesn't return her shopping cart to the corral. She's defensive. Says she has to leave the cart loose in the parking lot or else she will have to leave her child unattended in the vehicle.
Hundreds of people respond in some form or fashion, calling her lazy and irresponsible. She could easily take her child with her to return the cart. Returning the buggy literally takes fifteen seconds. That’s not too long for a kid to sit in the car. Workers have to pick up after people like her. The cart could roll away and damage another vehicle.
This woman is scum, they say. She's a bad role model to the child she supposedly cares about.
Others come to the mother’s defense.
Don't you know, they say, that child traffickers like to stalk parking lots of grocery stores, looking for their next victims?
What about the cart employees, another person asks? The existence of loose carts keeps a subset of the population gainfully employed.
It's an especially good job for people that don't speak English, somebody says.
I liked to pick up carts from the lot, a former grocery store employee chimes in. Gave me a chance to go outside for a bit and get some fresh air. It was my favorite part of the job.
Still, another woman decries these rebuttals. She says the excusing of this lazy cart behavior is an example of the unraveling of community and social norms. Says we are becoming a low trust society. It's depressing that other parents could come to this lady's defense.
Don't you see where we're headed? she asks.
This lady deserves a visit from The Cart Narcs, somebody says.
Yeah, typical lazybones behavior.
Cart Narcs?
It's a YouTube prank channel thing. Funny as shit.
I go on YouTube and look for these shopping cart pranksters videos. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of these videos. In them, an unseen man wearing a GoPro camera stalks grocery store parking lots and confronts customers who fail to return their shopping cart to the designated area.
He waves a red traffic baton at them, runs toward them making siren noises. “That’s not where the cart goes,” he says with all the authority of a timid church camp counselor.
He posts videos of the customers who have the most outrageous reactions, the ones who get angry, the ones who cuss him out, the ones who throw drinks at him. To further incite responses, he throws magnets onto their cars, magnets that read “I DON’T RETURN MY SHOPPING CART, LIKE A JERK” and “I GOT CART NARC’D”.
In the videos I watch, there’s a common refrain from the subjects.
What do you get out of this? they ask, approaching The Cart Narc, staring into the camera.
Don’t you have something better to do with your time?