Two Wheels on the Curb

Some people do the small right thing when nothing rewards it and nothing makes them. That part matters more than it looks.

This is The Unconsidered. A weekly newsletter about the things we stopped looking at, the questions we stopped asking, and what happens when we start again.

I have a move I’m not proud of.

When I’m in a hurry, or it’s raining, or the cart corral is somehow marooned at the far end of a lot the size of a small nation, I don’t return the cart. I do something worse, because it lets me feel like I didn’t. I steer it to the nearest curb and tip the front two wheels up onto it, so it won’t roll into anybody’s door. Then I walk away, telling myself I’ve been responsible. I didn’t return the cart. I tucked it in.

You can read a whole parking lot this way. There’s the person who walks the cart all the way back every time, rain or not, and lines it up inside the others like it matters. There’s the one who leaves it dead center in an empty spot, nose out, a small monument to not caring (who does that?!). There’s me and my curb. And there’s the cart that’s left the lot for good, the one some guy is pushing down the avenue with everything he owns folded into it, the same object the rest of us won’t walk thirty feet to put away, now carrying a whole life. We all hear the same squeak. We all judge the person who leaves it where it sits, right up until a gust catches it and sends it into someone’s door, the mystery scratch nobody can explain when they finally notice it 5 days later.

Because notice what isn’t there. No rule. No fee. And it isn’t that nobody sees you: there are cameras on the light poles, and me, quietly judging you from two spaces away. It’s that nothing comes of it either way.

That used to be unusual. For most of my life, the things you were supposed to return came with a penalty if you didn’t. The library charged you by the day for the book. Blockbuster charged a dollar a day for the movie, and in 2000, it collected nearly 800 million dollars in late fees, about a sixth of everything it earned. One guy paid forty of those dollars for bringing Apollo 13 back late, got angry enough to build a company whose one promise was no late fees, and that company is the reason Blockbuster is a story you tell instead of a place you go.

Every return I can think of came with a consequence. Except this one. There is no late fee on a shopping cart. No one is timing you. The manager does not come jogging out of the back with a coupon because you did the right thing.

Some part of me wishes he would. Ten percent off for a returned cart, a little ceremony, I’d take it. Which is the exact moment the whole thing falls apart, because if Target paid me to bring the cart back, I would never again know why I did. Decent, or just paid? The coupon would erase the information.

You cannot pay someone into character.

A cart can be tracked, of course. Moved online, it’s the most surveilled decision in retail. Around 70% of digital shopping carts are abandoned, and none go quietly. Each one sets off an email, a discount that chases you across the internet by dinnertime, a small machine somewhere noting that you hesitated. The abandoned cart, online, is pursued like a fugitive.

The abandoned cart in the parking lot is pursued by your conscience alone.

Somebody did try a version of the coupon, by the way, just run backward. At Aldi, the carts are chained together, and to free one, you feed it a quarter that drops back into your hand when you chain it up again. That’s the whole system, and it works so completely that Aldi lots have no strays and nobody’s paid to round them up. Twenty-five cents did what a generation of moralizing never could.

Though a quarter only nudges you if you’ve got a car to load. For the man pushing everything he owns down the avenue, that same quarter is the cheapest lease in America: a set of wheels and somewhere to keep a whole life, twenty-five cents down, refundable, except he won’t be bringing it back. He didn’t steal it, he paid for it. Take the quarter away, and you’re in the ordinary lot again, where the only thing returning the cart is whatever you walked in with.

I want to believe the people who bring it back anyway are the same ones in a scene you’ll never witness. The ones who’d find the address on your dropped wallet and drive it over with the cash still folded inside, because the thought of keeping it never fully arrives. I can’t prove that. The cart costs you thirty seconds, and the wallet costs you whatever’s inside it, and the cheap right thing has never once guaranteed the expensive one. But I’d bet on it further than I can defend, because the instinct that won’t let you leave a cart loose in a lot looks an awful lot like the one that won’t let you keep what isn’t yours.

I don’t think the cart sorts the world into good people and bad ones. That’s too tidy, and it lets too many of us off or hangs too many of us out to dry. What I think is quieter and stranger. That some people really do seem built to do the small right thing when nothing requires it, and that it’s findable, in a world that mostly stopped checking. The cart is one of the last clean places to catch it happening.

The rest of us are out here with two wheels on the curb. Not the clean thing. Not nothing. Some negotiated decency we can live with, worked out fresh in every lot, at whatever price we’ve quietly set for ourselves that day.

The cart you didn’t return this week is still out there somewhere. Nobody fined you. Nobody ever will. And that is the whole point of it.

The only one keeping score in that parking lot was you.