Good essay! It aligns with a meme I have detected in the social ether about “slop”. Slop is about the use of modern tech to mimic good music, good writing, good film making, etc. So I agree with your point that the shopping cart meme is about way more than shopping carts.
On the subject of returning carts, there's a natural experiment in my city: the parking lots at WalMart (probably >95% immigrant clientele) compared to those at the nearby Wegmans/Safeway/Giant (significant numbers of immigrants, but also of native-born white / Asian Americans).
WalMart's parking lot is a total clusterfuck of bad cart return practices: carts left in open parking spaces, carts stuck on the landscaping planters, carts that people at least take to the corral but don't bother to nest. Furthering the disorder, there's an adjacent Lidl with different-sized carts, and people still attempt to nest the Wal-Mart carts into the Lidl carts and vice-versa.
Wegmans/Safeway/Giant have parking lots that are immaculate and orderly by comparison.
This is not to say that the WalMart shoppers are all that malevolent or lazy, but it's clear that they come from countries where people don't think of public order as their personal responsibility, and in the WalMart lot that's the norm that predominates.
Good essay! It aligns with a meme I have detected in the social ether about “slop”. Slop is about the use of modern tech to mimic good music, good writing, good film making, etc. So I agree with your point that the shopping cart meme is about way more than shopping carts.
Wait. It sounds like you're saying this essay is about AI bros.
On the subject of returning carts, there's a natural experiment in my city: the parking lots at WalMart (probably >95% immigrant clientele) compared to those at the nearby Wegmans/Safeway/Giant (significant numbers of immigrants, but also of native-born white / Asian Americans).
WalMart's parking lot is a total clusterfuck of bad cart return practices: carts left in open parking spaces, carts stuck on the landscaping planters, carts that people at least take to the corral but don't bother to nest. Furthering the disorder, there's an adjacent Lidl with different-sized carts, and people still attempt to nest the Wal-Mart carts into the Lidl carts and vice-versa.
Wegmans/Safeway/Giant have parking lots that are immaculate and orderly by comparison.
This is not to say that the WalMart shoppers are all that malevolent or lazy, but it's clear that they come from countries where people don't think of public order as their personal responsibility, and in the WalMart lot that's the norm that predominates.