Shopping cart drift. That’s the name I’ve just this second come up with for the galling way that shopping carts have of ending up where they don’t belong. Specifically, my beef is with carts in wheelchair parking spaces. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may already know this. (If you’re not or you don’t, you are warmly invited to check out what I wrote here.)
The saga continues. Two days ago, we stopped at a grocery store to buy foodstuffs. (Maybe we were on our way back from the Glee 3D concert movie and maybe we weren’t – that’s not important here, can we drop it?) We’d returned to our vehicle and were just about to pull away when I heard the telltale clanging of misbehaving shopping-cart drivers. Sure enough, a lady was stuffing hers together with two other carts, all three now preventing a couple of wheelchair parking spaces from being used.
One noteworthy thing happened when my daughter and I hopped out of our minivan, grabbed the trio of carts and returned them to the store entrance. A man, sitting alone in his car a few spaces away, seemed unable to take his eyes from us.
He was well dressed enough not to be creepy, I guess. So either he routinely gets bored and stares at people when he’s waiting for his wife to pick up tonight’s T-bones, or he was wondering why we were so determined to get those carts out of those wheelchair spaces.
I’m hoping he put two and two together. Because science tells us that people are more likely to do good deeds when they see good deeds being done. And maybe, just maybe, Bored Steak Man is going to put his own shopping carts back where they belong from now on.
Speaking of observations, here’s a video that’s quickly gone viral: A New York group that self-identifies as a “prank collective” decided to set up a lectern, a megaphone, and a sign that read: “Say Something Nice.” Passersby did. It’s fun, the result is on YouTube and in four days they’ve had almost a million and a half views. Check it out!
50 Good Deeds 