Comment by will_a113@lemmy.ml on Krampus

Freaking people who leave their carts in a parking spot… Straight to the top of the list!

Over here in Germany using a shopping cart “costs” between 50 Cents and 2 €. You have to put a coin in them to release the chain by which they are attached to eachother. Of course when you return the cart and close the lock you get your coin back.

Little metal plates without monetary value but still the right size are common marketing gifts by companies and organizations yet they still provide mostly the same unconscious effect of “I want my coin back”.

Of course there are also people who use little gadgets to unlock the carts without putting anything in but I wouldnt know about such things…

It can cost much less than 50 cents

0.5 RON can be used, which are about 10 cents. You can also use fake plastic coins

That’s one of the things Aldi brought with them when they came over to the US. I’ve always thought it was a pretty cool idea, though as inflation keeps going the 25-cent lock-in becomes less and less of a motivator. Maybe a good reminder, though.

With how rarely I use cash I need my quarter back so I can use it to get a cart next time.

Good point. It’s really just a cheap key you have to have with you.

It is. In Germany it’s pretty common to have little plastic Keychains or coins to use instead of money.

Putting a quarter into a cart is a thing in Canada but it’s only ever at the low income grocery stores. The ritzier stores use a locking mechanism to lock the wheels if they leave the parking lot.

Didn’t someone make an audio file that can lock/unlock them at will?

What! I need to know more

I can’t find it now, but it was for some defcon thing 2 or so years ago.

It’s a thing in the UK as well

Slovenija too. It’s probably a thing in a large part of Europe.

We have these at airports in the US for luggage carts - though they don’t return any of your money if you bring the cart back they l’ve seen, so it doesn’t do much to modify behavior.

Want to know a sad irony? The cart returns are usually really far from the handicap spots. Parking is close to the store. But the returns are halfway down the aisle.

If everyone put them away, the person hired to put the carts back would lose their job. Yes, some used to hire more. Plus, supermarkets may consider having more than 1 trolley area that isn’t miles away from the cars parked there so they can ram more cars in there.

Could be kinder on folks with health issues that don’t have a blue badge…

“I’m a job creator!” I yell, as I shit on the floor of the DMV. “If everyone did this they would have to hire more janitors!” The police drag me away. “I’m opening new avenues for employment in our police department!”

Just in case you forgot the /s tag, that person’s job isn’t to collect the carts scattered across the parking lot, it’s to move the carts from the cart area to inside the store. The right way to handle the lack of cart areas isn’t to make the workers job harder, it’s to complain to the store.

So they can do nothing about it? Have you ever tried to phone a supermarket before?Some supermarkets cut back on the number of spots so customers could do the job of car park staff without paying them cutting jobs in the process. It was deliberate.

Tesco do it, others like ASDA have the cart spots closer to the end of the car park.

I guess if you’re that compliant in serving the capitalist class you can wash your dishes after you go to the restaurant. They’d love the “efficiencies”

Just get your lazy ass to walk a couple of meters. Jesus Christ. This is another of these issues only present in America yet americans pretend like it isnt their fault.

Firstly, it isn’t a few meters. Secondly, I think the term is disabled but hey, name calling isn’t a new thing.

I’m not in the USA BTW. I thought it was obvious by the fact I said ASDA and not Walmart.

“I will not comply in serving the capitalist class!” I screech, as I shit on the floor of a Wendy’s. “The so called “efficiencies” of a toilet only serve to annihilate the jobs once held by the noble proletariat janitors!” I yell as the police drag me out of the establishment.

No one historically shit on floors in supermarkets. They did historically have more cart spots, but decided to save money and cut jobs. The assumption is people will start doing the work for them.

They were very much right.

They put on self-service tills in the hope that folk would do it free. When they used to hire 30 checkout staff, they now hire 2 per 12 tills, so they save on 20 checkout staff per shift. Of course they weren’t redeployed to shelf stacking, as they already had shelf stackers. They just went to the job centre.

If you are happy being complicit in the losses of jobs, go ahead. Persuade yourself you’re moral and descent. You can either clap on the AI job losses as they hunt “productivity”.

Supermarkets have jobs to keep the car park clear, and if it only needs 1, they’ll hire one. If it needs half a shift, that person goes inside half the shift, but now they need less shelf stackers as they’re over subscribed, so they can remove one head count off that. If a supermarket has a cart spot near my car, I’ll use it. If I have to walk 5 mins out my way to the entrance, it’ll be placed neatly to the side joined to other abandoned carts not filling spaces and not blocking access to folk getting past.

In a classless stateless utopia where food was free and no one had to work it would still be considered polite and common courtesy to put away your shopping cart when you’re done using it at the local food co-op.

The floor shitting analogy is that we shouldn’t have people doing something rude just because it creates or maintains another job. Everyone can agree on the floor shitting analogy and it maps perfectly onto this argument. If you want you can add a preamble of “in this world, everyone used to shit on floors and there was a janitorial staff to clean it up.”

They put on self-service tills in the hope that folk would do it free. When they used to hire 30 checkout staff, they now hire 2 per 12 tills, so they save on 20 checkout staff per shift. Of course they weren’t redeployed to shelf stacking, as they already had shelf stackers. They just went to the job centre.

So by this logic you want gas station attendants back at gas stations, and for people to stop using ATM machines in favor of tellers? Maybe we shouldn’t use computers because of all of the stenography and data management jobs that were lost, not to mention all of the paper mills that were shut down as people moved away from using so much paper. As you see, jobs appear and disappear all the time. Why do you want people doing meaningless redundant jobs for the sake of their employment? That’s just cruel.

Maybe we should bring back the lamplighter guild and get back to using horses. Gas lights and carriages created a lot of jobs that were rudely snuffed out.

If the grocery store didn’t have to spend money putting carts away, the same person could be working inside the store where it’s warm and dry. Shitty people are preventing everyone else from better service and/or lower prices.

It’s adorable if you think that extra person is going to be working in store. There is a whole science around queue lengths that they use to cut jobs or push you to self service.

I guess the person would be warmer at home with no job, but it isn’t a good solution.

Its adorable that you think someone’s being hired to only do cart work in the modern day

That’s one responsibility for someone doing a shit ton of other things, usually shopping for remote orders nowadays

So yeah, they’d be inside, return the cart you massive cunt

I dunno about nowadays but where I’m from Cart Boy was totally a single function job in retail stores. You’d be hired just to gather carts. My friend liked it when people left them further away cuz they’d have an excuse to dawdle a bit and not interact as much with annoying customers.

For me, we primarily spent time bagging groceries until a decent number of wayward carts built up. Then we would collect them until there were only a few stragglers that weren’t worth collecting by themselves and go back to bagging. Nowadays it would probably be gathering stuff for instacart orders instead.

So you think if the cart guy helped out the full time in the remote orders they wouldn’t reduce a head count from that role? You know very little about how businesses run.

You could call me a cunt, but you’re either naive or don’t give a fuck about anything other than having acres of space for your SUV.

As someone who has done this job, I promise you, there’s always another task to accomplish. Normally the cart fetchers are also the store’s defacto janitorial staff, and there’s plenty of cleaning to be done at a grocery store. You are ignorant in this arena.

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