It’s not a shopping cart test. There’s no social cost to not getting a thank you email, and the candidate likely already provided thanks verbally. It’s redundancy, and as a hiring manager I do not care for it.
For shopping carts, I even take back those that are not mine if they are nearby.
There’s no social cost if you abandon your shopping cart. That’s why they use that as a test.
Hey. I get you don’t like them. That’s totally okay. I consider them pointless, personally. But it’s more than my own preference or else it would be false consensus.
But it’s like spelling: if you keep pluralizing ‘mail’ with an S, or using a comma for a period, no one who also doesn’t know better is gonna notice. The time when you will need proper spelling or etiquette – or smoke detectors or seatbelts, for that matter – will be when you least expect it.
There is a social cost to abandoning your shopping cart; it’s just not borne by the abandoner. Carts left in the parking lot can block parking spots or damage cars if moved by wind or gravity. Additionally, if no one returns their cart, there will be none available at the storefront for use by the next customer. That’s part of the “test” as I understand it - there’s no one grading you individually on whether you fulfill your communal responsibility to return the cart, but that doesn’t mean there’s no impact from your failure to do so.
Feels like we might be talking past each other or conceptualizing the shopping cart theory differently?
As a hiring manager, how many times have you picked a candidate, called them, and they’ve decided against being hired by you? That’s you, having to go look for a shopping cart. Of course anyone who is going to write the note also said thanks in person. But if they write to remind you of the good points in their interview, maybe address some omission, you know they didn’t thank you to your face but mock you in private.
If someone gets an offer that meets their needs better (pay, interest, whatever), I just go to the next viable candidate from my pool. That’s hardly an imposition or a personal slight, and the potential for this to occur doesn’t change any of my behavior when hiring (other than, perhaps, trying to make a quicker offer for highly-talented candidates so I don’t lose them to a different opportunity).
