Shopping Cart Theory
Have you heard of the ‘Shopping Cart’ theory? Neither had I until Covid hit. It was at that time when ‘people’ (ie not me) could not be trusted to buy toilet paper, pasta, food and now more recently, fuel.
I found it thoroughly fascinating because at first I found it incredibly simple and yet the more I thought about it the more I realised that it was a representation for the challenge of self-governance, governing and society itself - and how difficult these things are to navigate in a positive, collaborative way.
I have taken these words from numerous sources on the web, although the main source seems to be a Twitter account from May 2020 @ANTICHRISTJARED.
“To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as correct, the 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 presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it.”
It doesn’t seem like a big deal right? Yet since reading about this last year I have particularly looked at those stray shopping carts at various stores and found myself thinking why? Why was that person not able to put it back? Why did that person think they didn’t have to put it back? What did that person tell themselves to justify not putting it back? And of course, I cant answer these questions until I actually catch someone in the act of doing it - until then I just have my theories.
Which is, the people that leave them, generally are the type of people you wouldn’t want to be stuck with on a desert island with limited resources. They are people you fundamentally know you just cant trust or rely on, with anything, at all. They are the people who say they will be with you at 10am but haven’t even left at 9.45am when they know its a half hour journey and are still surprised they are late! They are also likely to be the ‘people’ that were panic buying all the toilet paper, pasta and fuel… Which of course means, if ‘we the people’ cant be trusted with this, how can we be trusted with big questions like government bias, the nature of state, poverty, foreign policy, climate, healthcare etc.
This of course is a very negative, biased and sweeping view that generally is based on nothing other than my ‘opinion’ rather than any real facts or data. Add to this the challenges around the notions of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and of course, experience, it becomes very complex and interesting.
However, whether the statement above is accurate or not, it does become fascinating when considering the conversations I have had with multiple people about the whole toilet roll/food/fuel situation - everyone I spoke to agreed it was ‘wrong’. So who were the ‘people’ who thought it was right to behave in these ways? I have yet to find them and I think that is because in conversation people will say they agree and yet not identify their behaviour as the same because they can ‘justify’ why they needed to do whatever it was that was in question. Or they simply just lied to me because they didn’t have the conviction of their actions to tell the truth, ‘knowing’ it was ‘wrong’.
A nice easy topic to think on!
So, do you put the trolley back?