The Simplest Thing: Put It Back

Today, I want to talk about one of the most simple things you could do to brighten up my world.

We all have pet peeves. We all have things that rub us the wrong way or get under our skin. I, in all honesty, don't have very many, but the ones that I do I am very passionate about. At the top of my list?

Shopping carts everywhere in the parking lot except for under the "return the shopping cart here" sign. 

Let me give you a couple of different scenarios that drive me up a wall:

1.  I try to pull into one of the very few parking spots left in a very full lot only to find 5 shopping carts haphazardly blocking the once open space. Please don't be the first person to put their cart in an empty parking space. Your cart becomes a magnet for the others who "don't have enough time".

2.  Watching a kid who is getting paid $7.25 an hour chase down 1700 carts left by his or her perfectly able bodied fellow citizens while sweating in a 110 degree Arizona summer. I know, I know, he's getting paid and no one is holding a gun to his head. But put yourself in his shoes, he gets paid to collect the carts, not cover up your laziness.

3.  Seeing gravel/rock/dirt/vegetation strewn all over the parking lot from a shopping cart forcefully placed on top of some innocent land. Now your creating work for even more people...not that creating extra work for others seems to bother you.

Recently, I saw a woman exit a store with a cart full of goodies. She unpacked the goodies into her cart and then placed her cart in an open parking space catty corner to her cart. Since she didn't put her cart back in the cart return, I figured she had a life-or-death emergency back at home. I was wrong. She then proceeded to walk into another store which required her to walk past a cart return. I kid you not. This isn't the only time I have witnessed this either.

Are there valid reasons to leave your cart wherever, whenever? Probably. But I can guarantee you that those valid reasons are rarely the case. So please, help me out here, is there a bigger reason other than laziness? Maybe, inconsideration? Elitism?

I don't know what it is exactly, I just know that whatever it is, I don't like it.

Am I being too tough on those who insist on not simply putting their cart back where it belongs? Maybe. But if I can have just one of you actually put their cart back into it's proper place after a shopping trip, then I would consider it a worth being too tough.

/rant