Last night as I was headed into the local Wal-Mart for yet another load of groceries for my always hungry crew I grabbed a cart on the way in as I usually do. Next to me, a mother and her three kids were walking in and the eldest boy says to the mother “Mommy, should I get us a cart too?”.

Her answer left me a bit mad, but not at all surprised. “No no honey, they have people to do that”

People have truly become more than lazy, they expect to be waited on hand and foot, even at a Wal-Mart. Maybe it the attitude that retrieving a cart is beneath them or perhaps their motives are less self-centered and they are looking out for the employment of the teenage cart pusher. In either case I think they are being lazy and they are just plain wrong.

I have had this conversation before with a friend who defended the need for the cart pushers, sorry, “grocery transportation equipment retrieval engineers”, to maintain their jobs. His attitude was that if the need for cart pushers fell off, the stores would simply fire them leaving them unemployed and increase their profits.

My argument was that these people are generally young teens and there is a high attrition rate, so the stores wouldn’t need to fire them, they would simply not hire one as one left. He countered that this still only increased store profits.

I agreed, but unly to a certain point. By returning our carts ourselves we may eventually reduce their staffing need and increase their profits, however when food prices rise dramatically stores usually absorb that increased cost when possible to eliminate temporary spikes in the market. We would eventually get the savings back in our own pockets as customers. And a store that has lower costs for things like retrieving carts, could operate more efficiently and provide more competitive pricing.

So, I leave it up to you. To bring your own cart, or to leave it to the cart pushers, that is the question. As for me, I will push my own cart and sneer at you for being lazy.