We all have pet peeves. Some people hate loud chewing. Some people hate when someone leaves thirty seconds on the microwave and walks away. Some people hate when people don’t use their turn signals. I have a different one.
Shopping carts.
Now before you judge me, hear me out. There are instructions. The store literally tells you where the carts go. There is a place for the large carts. There is a place for the small carts. There are cart corrals throughout the parking lot. This should not be difficult.
Yet somehow, every trip to the grocery store turns into a real-world experiment on human behavior. The small carts are mixed with the large carts. The large carts are sideways. One cart is somehow facing the wrong direction. Another is halfway in and halfway out like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to commit. And somewhere in the parking lot, there is always a cart sitting in a perfectly good parking space, abandoned like a shipwreck.
Who are these people? What happened? Did they finish unloading their groceries and suddenly get called away to an emergency? Did a helicopter arrive? Was there a witness protection relocation program that required immediate evacuation?
Because judging by the number of carts scattered around the parking lot, you’d think half the customers were fleeing a natural disaster. Now here’s where the story gets worse.
I can’t leave it alone. I wish I could. I really do.
But every time I walk toward the store and see the cart situation, something inside me says, “This cannot stand.” So I start fixing them. I put the small carts with the small carts. The big carts with the big carts. The backwards cart gets turned around. The runaway cart in the parking lot gets returned to civilization.
Five minutes later, I’m standing there looking at a neatly organized row of carts with the satisfaction of a man who has accomplished absolutely nothing of significance. Yet somehow, it feels important.
The funny thing is that the carts themselves aren’t really the issue. The issue is consideration. Returning a cart doesn’t make you a saint. Leaving one out doesn’t make you a terrible person. But the little things we do reveal something about us. Do we leave things better than we found them? Do we think about the next person? Do we make life a little easier or a little harder for everyone around us?
Those small choices add up. They always do. And if we’re being honest, we all have our own version of the shopping cart. Something that drives us crazy. Something that makes us shake our heads and wonder what people are thinking. The trick is remembering that everyone else probably has a pet peeve about something we do as well.
So yes, I will probably continue organizing shopping carts. I will probably continue rescuing carts from parking spaces. And I will probably continue wondering how a perfectly functional cart return can be ignored when it’s only twenty feet away.
It’s a completely reasonable pet peeve. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.
Troy P Zehnder 