You have to read between the lines on why that is so.
I also expect Aldi management isn't thrilled about homeless people camping outside their stores.
> Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
An enterprising 10 year old could rack a few bucks sometimes.
> Is this a US phenomenon
Yeah, you can kind of do whatever you want here. It's sort of our thing
Also it seems to be our thing to have an unbounded number of assholes who do stuff like throw rental scooters in rivers.
Here its mostly teens who throw rental escooters into rivers.
Asking for the same reason I asked OP my question. I was just in Berlin and, second only to Tokyo, I've never* seen such conscientious group of people, including teens.
* I'd actually place two other cities from that trip into the same #2 position: Zurich and Vienna.
Some links:
(2025) 300+ e-scooters recovered from the Spree (river in Berlin) by Spree:publik activist Jan Ebel: https://www.morgenpost.de/bezirke/treptow-koepenick/article4...
(2024) Readers of "Neue Rottweiler Zeitung" mention e-scooters in the Neckar: https://www.nrwz.de/rottweil/e-scooter-laufen-gut-in-rottwei...
(2021) 500+ e-scooters were thrown from the Hohenzollern bridge into the Rhine: https://www.golem.de/news/mikromobilitaet-im-rhein-liegen-hu...
(2021) Dozens of e-scooters in the Main: https://www.fnp.de/frankfurt/chaoten-werfen-scooter-einfach-...
Museums, libraries, and train stations aren’t places I go weekly, like a grocery store. When I do go, I can’t remember the last time I ever used a public locker. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used one of those in my life. I don’t tend to carry much stuff with me, so a locker isn’t something I generally need.
I was once 75 cents ahead by the time I made it inside of an Aldi in Columbus, Ohio because there were 3 free-range carts in the parking lot that I returned. Three was a lot -- most days I only found one cart hanging out in the parking lot.
In my current neck of the woods things are a bit different. There's never any carts roaming the parking lot, and there's usually carts with quarters already in them, parked properly up by the door.
(I often leave one parked with a quarter like that myself, but it's not because of some "pay it forward" quasi-altruistic purpose or something. Sometimes I just want to pick my groceries up out of the cart and walk to the car and I just don't have enough free hands to deal with retrieving the quarter. So I line up the cart with the others, grab my bag or two of things, and shove the cart the rest of the way home with my hip.)
Though occasionally you saw a cart far far away from a supermarket, where someone had basically stolen it, either teenagers to have fun, or someone asocial who, I don't know, used to carry all the shopping home? I don't really know what they did with it.
And it was the cost of replacing those stolen carts that drove the adaption of the coin operation system. Not that people just left them in the parking lot. Some supermarkets also tried a system where the cart locked if you moved it out of range of some radio in the supermarket, but that one really didn't take off.
(Also, quite a few people in Germany just do shopping by walking or biking to the supermarket).
And now they are again. Some new REWE carts already come without this feature.
However, shopping carts SuCk on anything but smooth cement.
While you're shopping? That's not a big deal.
When you return the cart? How are you driving home without your keys?
I guess Europeans might be more likely to not take a car to the grocery store, but I would prefer to use a basket over a cart while shopping in that case... I'll know when I'm done shopping when the basket hits my limit of how much to hand carry.
The only thing that's useful about those things is that it's easier to get them faster.
Yes. See also: resistance to COVID masking.
The only thing it did was fill up waterways and peoples lungs with microplastic
It did.
Again, all it did was contribute to our already nasty microplastic problem.
I will!
> data doesn’t lie
$5 sez you have some data that just so happens to confirm your biases, and i bet there's also some data that says masking actually did help. Utterly pointless arguing this nonsense, in the end it always just turns out to be speed-runs to some tedious conspiracy theories.
The answer to this question is always “no”. Regardless of the subject. Basically 100% of the time.
At my local grocery store everyone returns their carts. In the other place in the US I lived 10 years ago, there were loose carts everywhere.
The US is a very, very big country. Really more like 50 big countries. With huge variation in culture, income, background, etc. There’s barely anything you can say that applies to the whole country, regardless of the subject.
Just one variable: the Jerk Scale.
It is a US phenomenom yes. When it exists in other countries it's because of Hollywood exporting american culture.
Where did the USA import cart culture from? Mexico?
It seems likely to me that many countries are capable of domestically manufacturing selfish assholes.
Almost everyone returns them in all the supermarkets in my area.
I've been around Europe a fair bit and from Bulgaria to Portugal, people just return their carts. It's a no-brainer.