Cart-iquette

I’m well and truly ossed piff. I have absolutely no patience with approximately 99% of the human race at the moment. What the hell is wrong with people?

Over the past few years I have developed an intense dislike for parking lots. Parking lot behavior reflects the general “All for one, so long as the one is me” approach to life that seems to permeate our collective American group-think these days. If a parking lot has signs such as “STOP”, “SPEED LIMIT 15MPH”, “YIELD TO PEDESTRIANS” or “ONE WAY”, these signs are taken as general suggestions rather than directions to be followed. Drivers circle like vultures for the spot that is potentially opening up at the end of the row closest to the store when there are perfectly good spots five spaces down the aisle to park in; if they don’t get the prime spot they feel obligated to make some deprecating sign to the idiot who did get it. As for those prime spots marked with white sign with a blue wheelchair symbol … it would seem that the new definition of “Handicapped” is anyone who plans to be in the store twenty minutes or less.

Which leads me to today’s theme: Assholes who can’t return shopping carts to their proper place. Come on, people. You pushed the damn thing up and down sixteen aisles of grocery store, through a fifteen minute line at the check-out, and at least one hundred feet out of the store and to your car. You’re telling me you aren’t strong enough to get the now empty and far lighter cart to the cart collection site? You had plenty of time to shop, you don’t have thirty extra seconds to put the cart away? You had the energy to hook the front wheels over the curb next to your parking space so the cart doesn’t roll, so I know it wasn’t as though you had returned to your car and simply collapsed from exhaustion from transferring all those Ho Ho’s and Cheesy Poofs from the cart to front passenger’s seat (the better to grab a handful of regenerative empty calories for your drive home).

That little shopping cart you left hooked to the curb in the blind area of the parking spot, right behind the SUV parked next to you? Did you even realize that the next person coming into the spot wouldn’t be able to see it until it was too late? Did you know that hooking it to the curb meant the cart wouldn’t give way, so it could do maximum damage to the next incoming vehicle? It also guaranteed that the little shopping cart would be totalled. Do you even give a shit?

Yeah, the supermarket’s insurance is probably going to pay for the $1100 in damages – after all, you left their cart in another store’s parking lot, making the grocery store liable. And the store can always buy a new shopping cart (did you know those things cost $100 apiece?) But don’t you DARE complain the next time they jack up the price of your Pringles, you stage-of-evolution-just-below-the-slime-mold piece of positive osmotic excrement.

I so hope you choked on a Cheesy Poof on the way home….