I arrived on the scene early one Saturday. The suspects were long gone, but the evidence remained. One cart was wedged into a curb, another sat toppled over in a parking spot, a third drifted like a metal tumbleweed across the lot. My question: Why don’t people return their shopping carts?
I’m a psychologist who has spent the past decade studying how we think about our own behavior in relation to others. Perhaps the choice to not return a shopping cart seems trivial, but what we do with our cart says a lot about how we think about others and what we believe we owe one another (or don’t).
I’ve never understood why people don’t put their carts away. In high school, I worked as a shopping cart attendant at my local grocery store, shepherding carts across the lot. Since then, for reasons I can’t fully explain, people’s failure to return their carts bothers me more than it probably should, with every trip to the grocery store a reminder of the special kind of havoc humanity is capable of.
Then last year, on a windy weekend morning in a Wegman’s parking lot, it hit me. Not a cart, but the realization that I can do something productive about it.
So I approached the question of shopping cart abandonment the way I would any puzzle about human behavior: I collected data. My evidence came from an unlikely source: Cart Narcs, a small group of volunteers whose mission is to encourage cart return, sometimes gently, sometimes less so. They upload their efforts on their YouTube channel, which boasts hundreds of videos recorded between 2020 and 2025, taking place mostly in California, but also Nevada, Texas, Louisiana, New York, Canada, Australia, and England. Cart abandonment, it turns out, knows no regional bounds. As of September 2025, these videos have collectively been viewed over 90 million times. (See below for one of the tamer videos.)
I watched a total of 564 encounters between Cart Narcs and cart abandoners. These don’t represent a perfectly random sample of interactions, but together they capture a broad cross-section of everyday behavior. (And, as far as I know, it’s the largest archive of shopping cart behavior available.) Most interactions begin the same way: Someone leaves their cart and a Cart Narc requests they return it. At this point I documented what happened next, transcribing parking lot reactions word for unhinged word. To be clear, this was not a quick process. I spent dozens of weekend hours hunched over my computer pausing and replaying YouTube videos. People in my life called this “concerning” and a “waste of time.” I called it research.
My approach was inductive, which is a fancy way of saying that I had neither theory nor hypotheses. Instead, I let the data speak for itself, coding people’s raw (and wildly unfiltered) responses. Over time, patterns emerged, and eventually, I was left with a detailed catalog of behavior, complete with justifications, deflections, hostility, and, miraculously, humanity.
Why don’t people return their carts?
People had all sorts of reactions to being asked to do the right thing (see Figure 1). There were those who deflected, challenging the question itself rather than answering it. Do you work here? Are you the cart police? Do you represent this company? Who are you? Can I see your ID? Do you have any authority? Who do you work for? Who do you think you are? Why don’t you get a real job?
Some responded with anger and aggression. They yelled, cursed, and mocked. Some threatened to (or did) call law enforcement. Others escalated further, brandishing weapons like guns, tasers, or knives. “I’m gonna slash your face,” warned one man. “Why don’t I kick your ass?” asked another. A third shopper told the Cart Narc, “This is how you get killed.” If only returning the cart stirred as much passion as did refusing to.
Then there were the many, many excuses. In over half of the encounters I watched, shoppers provided at least one justification for their choice to abandon the cart (see Figure 2).
Many invoked entitlement, sometimes mentioning an identity they believed exempted them from common decency. “I worked at Safeway for lots of years and people left their carts all the time,” one man said. Another explained his choice to leave his cart by saying, “After 40 years of working retail grocery, I’ve earned it.” Earned what, exactly? The right to not pick up after yourself?
There were those who cited physical limitations barring them from cart return. “I’m 72 years old. I can’t walk that far,” explained a man after pushing his cart to the furthest edge of the lot. Another shopper clarified her choice to leave the cart in the middle of a handicap parking spot by mentioning, “I’m handicapped myself.” And one woman, upon being confronted about leaving her cart, declared, “I have really bad vertigo,” before getting behind the wheel and driving away. To be clear: Disabilities deserve accommodation. But if you could push the full cart to your car, why couldn’t you return the empty one?
Other people were simply too busy to return their carts. “I’m over an hour late to my own kid’s birthday party,” revealed one hurried shopper. “We have somewhere we need to be,” another alleged, before spending the next eight minutes arguing with the Cart Narc about how he didn’t have time to return his cart. Some mentioned inconvenience. “Them carts don’t even roll,” one shopper complained, after going out of his way to dig the wheels of his cart straight into grass and dirt.
Many justified their behavior by invoking norms and pointing to other cart abandoners. “Everyone else puts them there,” one shopper said, leaving his cart with a gaggle of similarly unreturned ones. “The culture around here is doing it,” insisted another, as if not returning one’s cart were a local tradition. This reasoning—everyone else does it—pairs best with a juice box and a timeout. If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?
Another type of excuse invoked other people by shifting responsibility (or blame) to others. Many shoppers pointed to their choice to leave the cart as a form of job stability or creation. “They pay someone to collect them all” explained one man. Another insisted that returning the cart is selfish because, “You’re putting someone out of a job.” It’s true that many stores do employ people to gather carts, but the job is to collect them from designated return areas—not to chase them down across the lot like loose cattle.
In some interactions I watched, people feigned ignorance. Like the woman who was unaware that carts shouldn’t be left on the curb: “I don’t know where we’re supposed to put them. I typically stop at Ralph’s.” As if basic decency is wildly store-specific.
My personal favorite justifications were the ones that invoked habitual good behavior, explaining their choice to not return their cart by saying they always put their cart away. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I put it back,” insisted a shopper after not putting his back.
But, between the shouting and the excuses, there were people who, upon being asked to return their cart, did. Some weren’t happy about it. “There’s too much going on in the world to pay attention to that,” one man grumbled while wheeling his back to the corral. Another threatened to break the Cart Narc’s arm before, incredibly, returning his cart. Others returned theirs silently. A few even owned up to their mistake. “I just got Cart Narc-ed! I apologize,” said one shopper. (Watch one cart abandoner’s mea culpa below).
What does behavioral science say?
We can also look to existing research in the social and behavioral sciences for insight into why people don’t return their carts.
People respond to incentives. At Aldi, for example, you can’t take a cart without first inserting a quarter. When you’re done, you return the cart and get your quarter back. According to Aldi, this system saves customers money: By eliminating the need to pay employees to collect stray carts, Aldi can keep their prices low. (This kind of deposit system is standard in many European countries.)
But if you Google “Aldi shopping carts,” you’ll find countless blog posts, articles, and videos explaining how to get around the quarter system, suggesting incentives have limits.
People respond to signals of hierarchy. Many of the cart abandoners I watched justified their choice by saying, “They pay people to do that.” The implication was that returning the cart would deprive someone of work—or worse, that the task of cart return was beneath them. The grocery store where I worked in high school didn’t bother trying to incentivize people to return their carts. Instead, they cemented the hierarchy by hiring teenagers like me to wheel carts out to people’s cars, not wanting to burden their clientele with the task of cart return. Even in stores where returning the cart is expected, people may fail to do so if they feel the task of cart return is beneath them. Seeing a task as low status makes neglecting it feel more permissible.
People respond to social norms. Psychologists distinguish between descriptive norms (what people do) and injunctive norms (what people think they’re supposed to do). When we see carts scattered across a parking lot, the descriptive norm tells us that leaving them is fine. But when we see other people returning their carts, it can feel wrong not to. Social norms cut both ways: They can excuse cart abandonment but also encourage cart return.
Promoting cart return might be as simple as setting a new norm. The insight that people adjust their behavior to match what they believe others are doing has powered countless “norm campaigns” from hotel signs reminding guests that most people reuse their towels to university initiatives curbing binge drinking by publicizing that most students do not drink excessively. In fact, shopping carts had their own norm campaign. In 1969, a retired grocer declared February “Return Shopping Carts to the Supermarket” month, in an attempt to recover stolen shopping carts. Norms can tell us what to do, but not always why it’s worth doing them.
But people respond to meaning. Without a deposit system or a norm campaign, the most effective motivator might be reframing the act itself. Like Blockbuster’s “Be Kind, Rewind,” which turned something that felt like a chore into a small act of kindness and a favor for the next person. Or, drawing from something more serious, the “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk,” campaign that turned an uncomfortable confrontation into a gesture of loyalty.
So, do your part, return your cart. Not because the cart matters, but because returning it means other people do.
