Oh what should I do with my supermarket cart

There is an etiquette to supermarket carts. Certainly if you shop at one of those European stores that use the quarter in the slot procedure, you retrieve your cart with your quarter and return it to the line of carts to get your quarter back. Nobody wants to give a quarter to the supermarket. Even a lawyer who gets a thousand dollars for billable hours will march the cart back to the store to get his quarter.

I usually go to the more laissez faire suburban supermarkets where the customer has discretion as to where he deposits his cart. Here there is a choice of being super nice and marching the cart to the front of the store and add it to the line of carts already there. Another option, when where there is a corral for supermarket carts in the parking lot, is to add the cart to this group. I like to stand five feet away and propel my cart into the group, creating some excitement for my day.

When it is convenient, or I have time on my hands, or perhaps am looking for some exercise, I will be a nice guy and return them to the proper places. But sometimes I am lazy, or I am late for something, or it is raining. Then I face the moral dilemma of how to handle the now empty cart.

The morally repugnant thing would be to deposit it in the driving lane. However, if there are lots of empty spaces I might deposit the cart in a parking space, ideally a space empty of cars but that already has a cart or two. In effect I am not ruining a parking space but am using a parking space that is already ruined.

Of course there is the old lift half of the cart on the grass and leave the other half of the cart in the front end of a space maneuver. The space is still usable, although now it is perhaps not an ideal parking choice. This is a morally ambiguous choice, similar perhaps to that of a devout Catholic who votes for a pro abortion candidate. It will not extend one's time in purgatory, but may result in being placed in a harder chair.

Editor's note: Those marked off queuing areas where you can put your cart at the entrance of the parking lot is called a cart corral. I learned that today with the help of Google.