Why not just take a couple more steps and go to the beginning of the store to take a basket?
Also a dedicated lane for leaving your groceries while you go pick up the reusable carrier bags you left in the car.
Pretty common to find an unused cart in the middle of the store 'round here. Not because the store put 'em there, tho. Well, sometimes it is. But not for the customers.
I normally take one of the pre-filled carts. Their suggestions are usually a pretty good starting place.
ikea has those yellow bags dotted around
It’s amazing how many grocery stores I’ve been in where this isn’t a thing.
Most stores I go to have stacks of baskets scattered everywhere for presumably that very reason.
Here in Japan it’s common everywhere I shop that’s more than a tiny specialty store. I seem to remember seeing it at least sometimes in the US when I still lived there.
I was about to say that here in Hawai’i it’s fairly common, but I realized when I saw your comment that it’s likely the Japanese influence here (I tend to see this most commonly at Don Quijote and Times, which is owned by the same Japanese parent company)
I wonder what Times in Hawai’i is; it’s a rent-a-car service here, heh. I imagine it’s called something different here. I don’t remember seeing it, but I haven’t been to Hawai’i since 2015ish.
That said, I doubt it’s Japan, but rather making it more convenient for consumers to spend more than they intended by making it easier to have a basket handy.
That’s funny. Here Times is a local Hawai’i grocery store chain. Pretty good poke.
Many actually do! There are some stores that position baskets inside the shopping space just for this case. Easy way to make an additional sale.
“I only came in for two items.”
And now I have a stack of items leaning against my chest and a 2L bottle hanging on each thumb.
Some do.
That’s a surprise. Feel like taking up the floor space for it isnt maxiziming profits.
Just do what everyone else does and steal someone else’s cart.
Ohh hey, free baby!
And they say spotting Psychopaths is difficult.
But what if they didn’t put anything I like in their cart?
Toss that shit out, these assholes keep putting stuff I don’t want in the carts I take from them.
They do – – they are the carts abandoned by those people who have the “oh, I guess I didn’t need a whole cart for this one thing“ moments
I basically never see abandoned carts, but I have returned to where I parked my cart to find it gone. I’m sure no one is taking it maliciously, but I am always just an aisle over and I parked it there because the aisle I need is jam packed with shoppers already.
The unwritten rules of the cart
Get a cart and a hand basket. Or, put an item in your empty cart and remove it when you return.
I believe, that would only really be a thing in the US? In most other countries, we have coin locks on the shopping carts, so you can only get them from the corral by inserting a coin into the shopping cart, and you only get your coin back when you return the shopping cart to the corral…
Never seen a coin lock in NZ.
We’re not “most other countries”, though. Sample size one.
Yeah, I might specifically remember the US not usually having them, because they invented/popularized shopping carts, which always feels kind of backwards that they’re using a simpler version.
Wikipedia has at least some info on the distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_cart#Deposits
(And I can confirm that here in Germany, you practically cannot find shopping carts without coin locks. I’m not sure, if I’ve ever seen one TBH.)
I’ve never seen it except for in Lidl here in Estonia. Most people return their carts anyway.
To increase your sample size, these seem to be rare where I am in western Canada. The only store I can think of that used to have them removed them at least a decade ago.
I’ve never seen this happen, I live in the US. I see abandoned carts in the parking lot not far from the return area all the time, but not just randomly in the store.
Do they have most robust locks? We have those at Aldi, they’re also all broken.
Where I live, I’d say there’s on average one cart with a broken lock per corral. But they’re also usually at the front of the corral, so you still end up with them relatively often…
Lowe’s does this and it’s quite clever. Maybe you came for one thing and saw some other stuff. Having a cart right there makes that extra sale where otherwise you may be too lazy to go get a cart.
It’s also nice for the employees not to have to return every cart to the front of a large store. I always filled those places when I ended up with an empty cart.
Funny, just yesterday I had seen that in a big drug store for the first time (consciously) and was impressed of that business smartness.
Carts are provided (and comically oversized today) because it gets people to buy more than if they looked full earlier:
https://proceedings.emac-online.org/pdfs/A2024-119348.pdf
(there are much older studies than that confirming the same thing)
Still, right tool/right job
Yep.
I hate that removing the smaller carts means I have to drag around a big cart.
I work from a shopping list - I don’t buy what’s not on the list.
