loading . . . Why Donât People Return Their Shopping Carts? A (Somewhat) Scientific Investigation 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 donât people return their shopping carts?_
Iâm 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 donât).
Iâve _never_ understood why people donât 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 canât fully explain, peopleâs 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 Wegmanâs 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 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.)
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I watched a total of 564 encounters between Cart Narcs and cart abandoners. These donât represent a perfectly random sample of interactions, but together they capture a broad cross-section of everyday behavior. (And, as far as I know, itâs 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 âconcerningâ and a âwaste of time.â 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 peopleâs 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 donât 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 donât you get a real job?_
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**_Figure 1:_**_Peopleâs responses to being asked to return their cart. Note: Responses are not mutually exclusive._
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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. âIâm gonna slash your face,â warned one man. âWhy donât I kick your ass?â asked another. A third shopper told the Cart Narc, âThis is how you get killed.â 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. âI worked at Safeway for lots of years and people left their carts all the time,â one man said. Another explained his choice to leave his cart by saying, âAfter 40 years of working retail grocery, Iâve earned it.â Earned what, exactly? The right to not pick up after yourself?
There were those who cited **physical limitations** barring them from cart return. âIâm 72 years old. I canât walk that far,â __ 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, âIâm handicapped myself.â And one woman, upon being confronted about leaving her cart, declared, âI have really bad vertigo,â __ 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 couldnât you return the empty one?
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_**Figure 2** : Excuses provided for not returning the cart. Note: These excuses are not mutually exclusive. _
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Other people were simply **too busy** to return their carts. âIâm over an hour late to my own kidâs birthday party,â revealed one hurried shopper. âWe have somewhere we need to be,â another alleged, before spending the next eight minutes arguing with the Cart Narc __ about how he didnât have time to return his cart.__ Some mentioned **inconvenience**. âThem carts donât even roll,â 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. âEveryone else puts them there,â one shopper said, leaving his cart with a gaggle of similarly unreturned ones. âThe culture around here is doing it,â insisted another, as if not returning oneâs cart were a local tradition. This reasoningâeveryone else does itâpairs 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. âThey pay someone to collect them allâ explained one man. Another insisted that _returning_ the cart is selfish because, âYouâre putting someone out of a job.â Itâs true that many stores do employ people to gather carts, but the job is to collect them from designated return areasânot 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 shouldnât be left on the curb: âI donât know where weâre supposed to put them. I typically stop at Ralphâs.â 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_. âNinety-nine percent of the time I put it back,â 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 werenât happy about it. âThereâs too much going on in the world to pay attention to that,â one man grumbled while wheeling his back to the corral. Another threatened to break the Cart Narcâs arm before, incredibly, returning his cart. Others returned theirs silently. A few even owned up to their mistake. âI just got Cart Narc-ed! I apologize,â said one shopper. (Watch one cart abandonerâs mea culpa below).
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**What does behavioral science say?**
We can also look to existing research in the social and behavioral sciences for insight into why people donât return their carts.
**_People respond to incentives_.** At Aldi, for example, you canât take a cart without first inserting a quarter. When youâre 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 âAldi shopping carts,â youâll 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, âThey pay people to do that.â The implication was that returning the cart would deprive someone of workâor worse, that the task of cart return was beneath them. The grocery store where I worked in high school didnât bother trying to incentivize people to return their carts. Instead, they cemented the hierarchy by hiring teenagers like me to wheel carts out to peopleâs 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 theyâre 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 ânorm campaignsâ 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 âReturn Shopping Carts to the Supermarketâ month, in an attempt to recover stolen shopping carts. Norms can tell us what to do, but not always _why_ itâs 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 Blockbusterâs âBe Kind, Rewind,â 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 âFriends Donât Let Friends Drive Drunk,â 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. https://behavioralscientist.org/why-dont-people-return-their-shopping-carts-a-somewhat-scientific-investigation/
