You needn’t stop at stop signs in parking lots.
Road signs on private land are often not legally enforceable by the police. You can ignore right-of-way and most signage in a parking lot or a parking-lot-adjacent path. I’m not saying that signs don’t serve a useful function. The stop in front of a Target or Publix is there to help coordinate drivers and pedestrians. It’s mostly a prudential matter. If it’s crowded, then those signs act coordinate us where norms might differ. But, if it’s late and no one is around, then you can safely run all of the parking lot stop signs with impunity. Be careful, however. The police can’t get you. But if you harm someone or something, then you can still be liable for neglect in a civil suit. That’s because neglect is contextual and expectations matter. If people treat parking lot signs like there are real road signs, then flaunting them can be construed as neglect.
You Can Park in Handicap Spaces.
If you’re *really* anti-social, then you should look up your local or state handicap accessible parking rules. Usually, police do have the power to ticket vehicles lacking the proper disability tags. BUT, the handicap parking space must conform to specifications. Where I live, for example, there must be an minimum sized sign that stands completely above 5 feet high in order to clearly demark the space. Therefore, if you see a handicap spot that is only noted by asphalt paint, then you’re free to park there.
Return your Shopping Cart… Or Don’t
Nothing says that you must return your shopping cart to an outdoor, covered, or indoor corral. People say that they have strong feelings about this (it’s not clear to me that they actually do). I say it’s not a fruitful exhortation. Let’s consider multiple perspectives and set aside the issue of civil liability due to neglect that I outlined above.
1) People have different abilities.
If you’ve gone grocery shopping in Kentucky or a similarly poor state, then you know that plenty of people are frail for one reason or another. Some people haven’t aged well and use that shopping cart as a walker. They’d have a tough time making it back to their car from the corral. Other people are morbidly obese and also depend on the cart as a walker. Adults with small children would also be left in a lurch. Either, they’d have to leave their children in the vehicle while they return the cart, or they’d have to juggle/grapple children while in a dangerous parking lot as they make their way back from performing their alleged civic duty of returning their cart. The bottom line is that some people have greater costs of returning carts than others.
2) You’re relatively bad at returning carts.
If you grant that high-cost cart returners can be forgiven, then get ready to adopt some Christ-level forgiveness. Let’s set aside that people value their time differently and have different costs. When you return your cart, your productivity is about 1 cart per 30-60 seconds. But there is usually an employee who will push an entire line of carts much more efficiently than you will. An unassisted cart-pusher can move a dozen carts in less than 12x the time it take you to push 1 cart. Indeed, especially if your times are equally valuable, you’re destroying social value by returning your own cart.
3) You’re ill-equipped to return carts.
Indeed. Many stores utilize motorized capital assistance to help push up to 50 carts. Lacking access to such capital, returning your own cart means that society bears a cost that is 50x greater than if you were to let the experts do it.
4) You lower the wage of low-skill employees.
Let’s grant the unreasonable assumptions that your time is just as valuable as that of the cart-pusher* and your productivity is just as high. If you return your own cart, then you are lowering the marginal cost of performing the duties of a cart pusher. You’re making their job easier. Indeed, you’re increasing people’s willingness to take the job of cart-pushing by exactly the cost that you bear by returning your own cart. That greater willingness to work reduces wages for cart pushers as more of them compete for jobs the newly pleasant jobs. Indeed, not only that. You also reduce the demand for cart-pushing services by the grocer, further lowering pecuniary compensation for cart-pushers.
5) Why stop at cart pushing?
The argument that you should return your own cart is an argument in favor of more autarky. Why not clean-up after yourself even more? When not sweep or polish the grocery aisles after you walk down them? After all, why should anyone else be responsible for your shoe debris? For that matter, you should also bag your own groceries and refuse to employ a cashier. They didn’t deign to load up a cart of work for check-out. You did. Some stores stock their shelves with “super packaging”. That is, packaging that holds together the units that are meant for individual sale. You don’t remove, flatten, and recycle that super packaging either. But why the heck not? Doing so would clean-up after yourself and decrease the costs of the store, after all. It’s the pinnacle of enlightenment.
What’s missing from the entire conversation about returning carts is gains from trade. Taking responsibility for your actions is fine and good. Insisting that people engage in autarky is a matter of moral taste. After all, taking responsibility for yourself can be in the form of exerting your own efforts or of consensually employing someone else to it. Do the self-righteous cart-returners also insist on doing their own taxes? Surely not. The majority of people employ a 3rd party in order to fulfill their income tax filing responsibility.
Success Without the Warm & Fuzzy Signaling
Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that there does exist a store where people do return their own carts and where they do collect the super packaging. That store is Aldi, everyone’s favorite German model of efficiency. In the US, if you want to use a cart, then you must deposit a quarter (25 cents) while you use it. You can have the quarter back, but you must return your cart. For my mom, it’s not so much that she pines over that 25 cents. Rather, that quarter is her “Aldi quarter”. She keeps it in her vehicle cup holder so that she can conveniently use and return her Aldi cart.** Aldi doesn’t employ cart-pushers.
Aldi also doesn’t provide zero-priced grocery bags or bag your groceries for you at checkout. Therefore, shoppers often take the super packaging from the shelves to use as their own containers. That allows Aldi to reduce and reuse materials as well as reduce labor costs. Have you ever noticed that Aldi cashiers sit rather than stand? That way they become less fatigued and more willing to supply their labor.
At the end of the day, Aldi manages to achieve exactly what the cart-returners want, and then some – all without the virtue signaling and social pressure. But that’s exactly the problem with Aldi. It doesn’t let people indulge in pretending to have strong, righteous feelings about costly prosocial signals. Aldi creates incentive compatible institutions that improve the world by helping the narrowly self-interested engage in prosocial behavior as a mere side effect of their own self-involved pursuits.
*That’s what we call people who push carts. My brother’s an experienced cart-pusher.
** Someone broke into my mom’s car once. She lamented that they had taken her Aldi quarter. What a hassle!
Economist Writing Every Day 