Shopping Cart Theory Completes the Horseshoe

Religions never give you proof. You have to take a leap of faith. If you had proof, you would no longer be obeying because you want to, but because it is transaction: behave well and get rewarded. That produces people who behave well until they are unobserved.

We might call this the Garden of Eden problem. When the deity is around, the hominins play fair. As soon as God takes a nap, the hominins get caught in the Dunning-Kruger Effect and do something massively stupid.

Jesus, Buddha, and Plato struggled with the same problem: how to orient people toward affirmative good instead of defensive reaction to fear of bad (or even the Iudaic “evil”). This is ends-over-means thinking: you do the good because you desire the good, not because you fear consequences.

The originally shopping cart theory went like this:

The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing.

To return the shopping cart is a convenient, easy task and one which we all recognize as as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart represents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.

A person who is unable to do this is no better than animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force behind it.

The Shopping Cart is what determines if a person is a good or bad member of society.

Trader Joe’s counters with:

Returning your grocery cart releases dopamine in your brain, which makes you feel good. It’s a small task, but it requires effort and discipline, so completing it gives you a sense of accomplishment. Additionally, it shows consideration for others and triggers even more dopamine, boosting your mood.

Two theories mutually differentiate here: you should return the shopping cart for the benefit of social order, or you should return the shopping cart so that it feels good. The former is consequentialist, the latter individualist.

Science says that most people return shopping carts for the optics, either because we want to manipulate others into liking us or because we simply want to fit in.

Social norms fall into two general categories. There are injunctive norms, which drive our responses based on our perception of how others will interpret our actions. This means that we’re inclined to act in certain ways if we think people will think well or think poorly of us. And there are descriptive norms, where our responses are driven by contextual clues. This means we’re apt to mimic behaviors of others—so what we see or hear or smell suggests the appropriate/accepted response or behavior that we should display.

Yes, we want to generally behave like others of our choosing because we want to be accepted, but we also have goals that serve ourselves or provide us with immediate satisfaction. The data above suggests that as a situation broaches on deviance, more people will trend toward disorder; once we have permission to pursue an alternative action, we will do so if it suits us. Not returning our shopping carts opens the door to throwing our circulars on the ground to parking haphazardly or in reserved spaces to other items that impact the quality of our experience at that establishment.

In other words, our motivations boil down to (1) fear of others not accepting us or (2) desire to be seen as positive by others. The real test may be then who returns the cart when no one is around.

As Jesus, Buddha, and Plato pointed out, when there are rules, we obey them out of fear of the consequences; this seems like a good system to those in power, but like Communism robbed people of direction, it stops people from having an inherent desire to do good.

The affirmative desire to do good because it leads to a more beautiful, sane, logical, harmonic, balanced, and good existence? That does not calculate for psychologists; no wonder after a century of their therapies people are crazier than ever!

Funnily enough the costs of lost shopping carts are passed on through higher grocery prices:

Roughly two million carts vanish from stores each year — costing companies an estimated $175 million annually to replace

The issue isn’t new, but it’s getting more attention as retailers escalate their fight against rising shoplifting and in-store losses.

One of the biggest changes retailers are making to prevent thefts is axing self-checkouts. Dollar Tree removed machines from 12,000 stores, and found themselves experiencing an 8 percent sales boost.

Most of these carts are taken by ghetto/trailer people and the insane homeless. The former use them to transport groceries and then leave the carts hanging around apartment complexes or tossed aside in waste land.

The latter use carts to transport their possessions and tend to steal new ones all the time, then leave them far away from the stores in the places where the homeless gather, namely empty lots and behind dumpsters.

In the bigger picture, cart returns are an example of how broken windows theory explains the epidemic of bad behavior: small things if tolerated suggest bigger things might be accepted too.

On a societal level, we are seeing the triumph of herd behavior and flocking behavior through Crowdism and utilitarianism. People fear conflict, so they adopt pacifism, equality, etc. and instead just subsidize the problem.

When you think that way, you force everyone to pay more for groceries so that you can tolerate the behavior of the poor:

Last year the board of supervisors in Fairfax County, Va., met to address “the visual clutter” of stray carts with a proposal to impose $500 fines on people who wheel them off store property.

“It is a real problem,” Jeffrey C. McKay told his fellow supervisors during the session. But others on the board argued that it would penalize people who are struggling economically and use the carts to get food home or carry their belongings.

The horsehoe theory reveals its real form here: at some point, defending the poor becomes injustice to the not-poor, and vice-versa, which is why at some point all political systems go authoritarian no matter how benevolent they were intended to be.

Apparently it has not occurred to these people that functional poor people would return the carts over the same distance they took them to get home. Let us just say that it is no mystery why most of these people are impoverished.

It seems to me that for a sane person, the concern with returning a shopping cart would involve issues not discussed here. First is safety; loose carts can hit people or be hit by cars. The second is avoiding that “visual clutter” and neurosis by having everything in its right place.

The second might be thought of as peace of mind. When you can trust others to do their part in maintaining order, doing your part is much easier since you do not resent being one of the few who is keeping the rest afloat by doing their work for them.

The final part might be seen as our conditioning of ourselves. If you live in a society where carts are returned, you condition yourself to return carts and do other good things, in inverse of “broken windows.”

You also have the peace of mind in living in a thriving society which is moving upward instead of a dying one which is headed downward. Everything makes sense and people strive for the good in this type of society.

We might see this as an extension of aesthetics and hedonism. That is, it is most beautiful to live in a thriving ascendant place, and most pleasurable as well, so we opt for that because to maintain social order is to make a nice place for ourselves.

This simply has a longer attention span and wider cast (30,000ft view) than your average person who thinks only of themselves and abstractions like morality, popularity, law, and salaries.

I call this system “the Hessian system.” The Hessian values system is based on action/response.

That is, if you do certain things, certain results occur. Do you want these results? This throws the question back to the individual of what future they desire (this was the method Plato used in The Republic).

Hessianism is both politically progressive, in that it rejects all unjust authority and pointless rules or jobs, and hardline conservative in that it points to nature not human judgments, desires, or feelings as the ultimate arbiter of what is not “good versus evil” but an obvious outcome and whether or not we want it.

It asks not what we should fear and avoid, but what we should strive for and move towards. It asks the question not of what is justice, but what is noble and thus, life-enhancing.

It ends up at a mixture of aggressive and nurturing, but that is a story for another time. Rest assured however that people thinking in Hessian terms return their shopping carts every time.