Shopping Carts in Parking Lots

I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with grocery carts and parking lots. I’m not proud of all of it.

Years ago, humans unloaded our grocery bags filled with groceries for the week into our car, and then we walked our cart back up to the line of carts at the entrance of the supermarket. We just did it. It was like brushing our teeth. We wouldn’t leave the cart in the parking lot, taking up parking spaces so other people couldn’t get into them. But that was a long time ago.

Slowly but surely, we stopped doing it. We’d just leave the cart in the space next to ours, or maybe push it to the front edge of the parking spot so perhaps another car could still squeeze in.

A few years ago, I read a study that said successful people in life are more likely to return their grocery carts to the proper spot. You know those people, who dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Yes, they did a study, and maybe our tax dollars paid for it. Whatever. I want to be a successful person in life, and I also felt a little ashamed. So I started doing it—returning it to the front of the store. And I thought about how successful it was making me as I walked it to where it belonged.

Then came the cart corrals. A little fenced-off section in the parking lot—usually taking up one or two actual spaces—just so people wouldn’t have to walk all the way back to the front. So American. A quick fix. God forbid you should have to walk an extra hundred steps in your day. And I wondered if they would do a study about whether the successful people used the corrals and didn’t walk all the way up to the storefront. Just to be on the side of success, I continue to walk it to the front of the store.

With all that—how easy they have made it—I still see carts strewn across the lot. And now there are people wearing neon vests, pushing long trains of abandoned carts back into place—like stray cattle during spring roundup.

I’ve decided it’s a metaphor.

Because the truth is, it’s more than laziness. It’s a public statement.

Don’t tell me what to do. I don’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else. I’ll do what I want, where I want, and I don’t really care if it takes up space in your parking spot. And I certainly don’t care what the grocery store parking lot looks like. I’m just passing through.

I lived in the Hamptons when COVID hit. The tipping point for me, the moment at which I knew I wanted to move away, was when I went to the grocery store at 6:00 a.m. one morning and the lot was pretty much empty. But the parking lot was strewn (strewn, I tell you!) with those surgical gloves that people wore at the beginning of COVID. They wore them into the store, loaded their groceries in the car, and then threw them on the ground. Just threw them there. I stared at them and thought of my housekeeper, who told me I was the only one paying her even though she wasn’t able to clean my house. I knew that it was she or her husband who would be picking up those gloves, and I moved to Maine. True story.

Because it’s who I want to be. I want to be a good neighbor, not a person who leaves their grocery cart in the middle of the lot for someone else to wheel away.

I want to be a helpful member of society.

I want to make it easier for others.

Somewhere along the way, we all lost the plot. And what if that is why we are in the American mess we are in?

We pick and choose the ways we help others. We support certain organizations that connect with us. Or our friend cares about them because of their child’s challenges. We donate to causes that matter to us or our inner circle. And that’s great, but I’m suggesting we might want to care more about that which doesn’t directly affect us.

This is about choosing to be a good person pretty much all day, everywhere we go, in every little way, for everyone who might not have quite what we are gifted with. Lucky us.

If we start cleaning up the little things, maybe it will be easier to clean up the big things, which are terrifyingly broken and seemingly out of our control. Maybe, just maybe, it will begin with the little things.

Maybe the big things became so big because we stopped caring about the little things.

So walk your grocery cart back up to where you got it.

A good place to start the rebuilding of our society? Maybe.