![](/static/253f0d9b/assets/icons/icon-96x96.png)
![](https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/b897e38e-bf08-42ba-b1d0-844a22b03bb2.webp)
I’m a fan of the Capitalist Realist Shopping Cart Theory, myself.
Putting shopping carts away is bad for society and you should stop doing it.
The reason is that putting a shopping cart away requires labor, labor requires a person to do it, and the person who has to do it is employed by the grocery store.
Thus, if enough people refuse to put their shopping carts back, enough excess labor will be generated at grocery stores around the country that they will be forced to hire more people to do it, creating jobs.
QED
But there’s only a certain amount of labor a fixed number of employees can absorb. Imagine a scenario where everyone everywhere agrees to stop returning shopping carts - grocery store employees would be forced to spend their entire shift just corralling them, and then they wouldn’t be able to man the cash registers or stock the shelves or whatever else, thus forcing the store to hire another employee on each shift to be the dedicated shopping cart return person.
Logically, every store everywhere tries to run with the minimum number of people possible to keep costs down. The idea is to create a situation where that minimum number of people is increased.