What your shopping-cart handling says about you
Shopping carts reveal much about their handlers. If you’re thinking about hiring a new employee, consider choosing someone whose worldly possessions are packed in a stolen shopping cart rather than some thoughtless jerk who doesn’t put his empty cart where it’s supposed to go on the parking lot.
Yes, we responsible cart users feel very much superior to all of you cart mis-handlers who, per my perceptive imagination, aren’t reading my columns anyway. So there.
Meanwhile, anybody who grabs a cart in the parking lot to use like a walker to get to the store might have a bum knee or back or two bum knees. That person might be getting old. Ask me.
Somebody who jumps on a full cart to coast back to his or her car might be a daredevil or just lazy. Or both. Ask me. I’d do that more often if I could remember where I parked my car.
Life with grocery carts starts early. When I was young enough to ride in one I don’t think they had seating for children. I could be wrong.
Daddy did nearly all our shopping to keep my mother from splurging on green grapes. He didn’t often take me. That said, I do remember one grocery store that sold Little Golden Books for a dollar at the checkout counter. We tended to go there as a family, and I often got a book of my choosing. A dollar would have bought a lot of grapes back then. I knew I was lucky every time I got a book.
Back to shopping carts. If you choose to shop without one, you’re probably not buying much. You zip along with just a plastic basket on your arm even in crowded situations. Good for you. You’re like a bicyclist in a traffic jam. Other shoppers either resent you or envy you. Or both.
Another option is to tell yourself you’re not going to buy much and you can clutch all your purchases to your chest quite handily. Ha.
Again, back to carts. They reveal absentmindedness. Have you put your cellphone in your cart and forgotten to retrieve it after conscientiously parking your cart in the designated spot? I once left two in a Walmart cart. One was my business cell phone and the other my personal cell phone. Whenever I misplaced one, I could use the other to call it. Not that day.
I admire those cart people who push long lines of carts back to the store, especially the ones who turn in lost cell phones. Thank you.
Another personality trait revealed by shopping carts is the martyr complex. If you get a cart with an errant wheel and choose to keep it anyway, that would be you. Sometimes it’s me. Or are we revealing our conceit by thinking we can somehow deal with an impossible situation? Do conceit and martyrdom go hand in hand?
Ponder that question while we close with a proverb:
There are no bad shopping carts. Just bad wheels.
This article originally appeared on Wichita Falls Times Record News: Your shopping cart skills say something about you
