I don’t mean just returning your shopping cart to the cart area, but actually sliding it back in. At my grocery store, some people half ass stack it back in or don’t at all. This drives me nuts because when I come to return my cart I have to fix the mess before I can return mine. Plus, I don’t want the workers who collect the carts to do any more work than they already do.
I caught this one guy who was returning his cart and I had to wait until he was done. Instead of stacking his cart, he just left it there in front of the stack and I said, “C’mon man!” He was surprised and said, “Oh!” then immediately stacked his cart.


Some supermarkets here require a token to use. That token is returned on the complete restacking of your trolley
It does well enough at training our population.
We’ve had that in Germany for many years but for the last few years, many supermarkets in my region have stopped using the tokens. Looks like the “training” worked though, as I still never see any unreturned shopping carts on parking lots.
At the Aldi in my area many of the token mechanism are broken, so the carts are always loose. They get put back by people anyways, which makes me happy.
I went to an Aldi not realizing they would have this, I do not carry pocket change. Asked clerk to break a bill for change, he just handed me a quarter from the till. I’m like, thanks I’ll bring this back I guess, he said he didn’t care. Oookay. Still not sure what to do with that free 25¢, invest it maybe.
Same in Austria. Noticed our Lidl removed the coin/token slot recently.
This is happening in the Netherlands as well.
We absolutely need this
They recently stopped using this in the area of Germany where I live. I hate the change. People immediately started leaving their carts all over the place. It’s crazy that €1-€2 deposit was the only thing holding people back from being jerks.
I’m in Germany too, nobody leaves their trolleys sitting around.
That sucks. I noticed our Lidl did the same (maybe other supermarkets, too, haven’t paid attention), but people still return the carts. This is in Austria.
If the supermarket starts spending more on labour/lost carts than they were losing with lost business/upfront cost, they may bring them back. I wonder what the conversation is between supermarkets. They have to know the one spending upfront for these devices is training the local population reducing the other’s running costs.
There’s only one shop within 400km of where I live that uses these.
People here do seem to do a reasonable job of returning their trolleys to the bay.
I think most of the trolley collectors are disabled in some way, so their jobs will be subsidised.
A bit beyond the scope of the post. But instead of supermarkets using society to subsidise their labour costs, we could use supermarkets to subsidise society. Tax the wealth and institute a UBI.
details of oppression uwu
Tap for spoiler
goodwill is the sweatshop SNAP applicants are shunted to for less than min wage, if they aren’t otherwise meeting the work requirement instituted…
Honesly idk if it was 2017 or a last ditch Busch Jr thing. Certainly tried.
i like to mention it, bc i talked to some caseworker and counciling staff who were unaware, despite their clientel relevance.
Sucks if you can’t handle a concrete box full of light and noise and the reek of harassed strangers. After some training videos, of course.
Go usa. (fortunately urban gardening and grocer coop is improving…)
Forced or underpaid labor of anyone, esp minorities anyware is hella bad. uwu down with labor extortion.
I worked one grocer that had the ghost of a union coughing out, and we had a light duty round and a low key vibe on night stocking. The bored jocks and people who wanted a temperature change did the cart grabs. Not just whoever was on some dole voucher(general).
All supermarkets here do. But some people have removable tokens you can just pull out. And nobody botheres to chain them up again. But people still put them back properly
The problem I have with this is that it’s a barrier of using the shop if you don’t have a £/€1 coin on you. There’s an Aldi by me where the trollies have this lock on them, but the Tesco opposite doesn’t so I’ll just not go to Aldi as I can’t get a trolly.
Absolutely true, it does present a barrier. I had a token attached to my keys for my own sanity.
Now that token perminantly lives in my car after the clippy thing broke. If I’m shopping for enough things to need a trolley, I have my car. My peers all have these things in the cupholder/ashtray of their center console.
The timing worked out, I had the token attached to my keys while I was without a car, and it broke just in time for the arrival of the car.