I’m a fan of the Capitalist Realist Shopping Cart Theory, myself.
Putting shopping carts away is bad for society and you should stop doing it.
The reason is that putting a shopping cart away requires labor, labor requires a person to do it, and the person who has to do it is employed by the grocery store.
Thus, if enough people refuse to put their shopping carts back, enough excess labor will be generated at grocery stores around the country that they will be forced to hire more people to do it, creating jobs.
Littering has environmental impact, and looks bad. Carts being put back by the company or the customer doesn’t hurt the environment. If it looks bad the company creates a job to ensure the customer keeps coming.
But is creating those jobs actually something we want? How much does someone get paid for collecting carts? How much does that increase prices for basic necessities? Do we have a labor surplus such that any job is a good job?
The answer to all of those is “no.” I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather keep my office job than go collect carts, so I put my cart away so the person would would have that job can get a better job.
So my personal take on shopping cart theory is that it assumes putting away shopping carts is not a fun job.
I have worked at whole foods for 2 years, and the thing I hated the most was how it felt like Bezos’s watchful eye was always on you. The supervisors could be super persnickety about your breaks. Compared to my new life as a self employed musician, it was like prison, but that’s retail for ya.
I personally loved cart duty. It was a time when I could go outside, get some fresh air, and not be under the surveillance of that god awful company*.
So now if it is a nice day out, I will go out of my way to put the cart in left field. I call it a chaotic good move.
That said the “it keeps jobs” is BS. If cart duty wasn’t a thing, the person would still be filling baskets and cleaning windows.
*Note: the Halstead location in Chicago was actually really great. Maybe it was the Stockholm syndrome of working retail during pandemic, maybe it was Midwestern kindness, but that team actually seemed to care about each other’s wellbeing and we’d even hang out. I lean towards Midwestern kindness though, I moved here from Seattle and while I miss the mountains, I CERTAINLY do not miss the social scene. Despite what the news tries to tell you, Chicago takes care of its own. Even when I was a stranger in a strange land, and then homeless during polar vortex, the people took me in. Every. Night.
Not sure if I’d visit, but I’d definitely live here.
Sorry for the Chicago tangent, I’m a few handshakes deep and I get emotional about this fuckin’ place.
OpenSuSE - YaST is as good as is made out to be. I like how many fundamental parts of linux are managed via one tool. Other distros I’d used before were heterogenous mix of tools that felt cobbled together and inconsistent, while YaST feels well designed, integrated and consistent.
Depends on your beliefs. There are people who believe in being judged for every action by an almighty force or being, so it’s probably not absolutely perfect. I might be smitten in my next life for it.
The prevailing wisdom used to be that if somebody is tired of Windows and wants to switch you would send them to Ubuntu. Having used Ubuntu and Debian and Mint and Pop! OS and CentOS and Red Hat and Fedora and Kubuntu, Kubuntu with the new KDE plasma desktop seems to be the most Windows like while still retaining the Linux flavor OS that I have used so far.
Ubuntu by comparison is slow and convoluted and those are huge turn offs for neophyte Linux users who want to get away from Windows.
Remember please, this is opinion, and was asked for.
I ain’t mad, but I wish he/they wouldn’t. I’m not even a fan of tv based invasive encounters with wildlife. Even Steve Irwin often pushed past what I consider acceptable interference for education, but I’m on the strict end of things with that.
Here’s why.
Cameras. It was extremely rare for Irwin to show us something that couldn’t have been achieved with a good camera from a reasonable distance that not only got good images, but showed more natural behaviors. I still love Irwin, and think his enthusiasm and love of animals balances things out in terms of benefits.
We’re at a point with camera technologies that direct interaction with wildlife is unnecessary. We can use any number of tools to see the glory of nature without putting our thumbs up their butt to see what happens (not that he ever did, but I love that episode of South Park lol, and it fits how I view that kind of thing).
We have zoos, we have education centers, we have captive bred examples, so we don’t need multiple people out there repeating the same thing over and over. I get the desire, I get the interest in such filming, and as long as the wildlife isn’t harmed, I don’t care enough to raise any hell. I just wish we would collectively stop. Film from a distance or use tools to get close, use old footage of invasive interactions instead of new ones.
Peterson is no worse than anyone else, and better than most. I dig his enthusiasm. It just isn’t necessary, and its value for education is lower than it should be, in order to be acceptable to me.
But, again, I ain’t mad. No hate, no call to arms, I just wish he’d stop and do other things instead.
An example of the worst kind of thing he does. It’s nothing to be mad at, but totally unnecessary. It interferes with the spider for no good reason. We learn nothing from disturbing the spider that a voiceover couldn’t provide, along with some footage of a captive bred spider being handled to show that we needn’t fear spiders (but shouldn’t mess with them in the wild). This particular video exemplifies what I object to, and why better than any others I could recall.
Typically parking lots are filled with cars, and I need to drive between the parked cars. If a cart is in the way it makes it harder for me to leave, just saying
Ive been to ~5 grocery stores ~80 times in the past couple weeks. Was driving instacart at night to get some bills paid I was worried about. Not once did I come across carts that were just in the parking spots/street, they always are in the cart holders that take up parking spots. I standardly pull my cart from one of those and wheel it into the store which leaves it at a net 0 move when I put it back… That said, with the number of people who are hunting for jobs right now that I know, this may be the first time I would say the store hiring someone to return carts is another employed person. Kroger really isn’t going to go bankrupt supporting the local populace with 1 extra job. Publix on the other hand has employees actively asking to take my cart before I can close the trunk. Had been pretty impressed by it. One day I went to 4 different Krogers, it is a bit interesting to see the difference in the stores based upon the people/house cost that live in the areas.
kbin.life
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