People are funny.

One of the cultural differences I noticed after our move down here is the common courtesy practiced by just about everyone. I always thought people were pretty nice back in New Jersey but they just don't hold a candle to southerners.

Case in point - shopping carts. In New Jersey (and the parts of New York we frequented) there was never a place to put your shopping cart when you finish packing your car. The common practice was to leave it between the parked cars or worse, behind the next car so that person couldn't pull out until they dealt with the abandoned cart. (I admit to having words with a few individuals in the past.) :-)

Now in North Carolina, not only does just about every store provide corrals for their carts, people use them! It's the rare individual who abandons a shopping cart. Doesn't matter what the person looks like, how you might profile them, even the most unlikely seeming folks walk their empty carts to a corral or back to the front of the store. And teach their children to do it too!

That said....this is what happens when the store doesn't keep up!


Seriously! There's about a car-length of carts sticking out there. As I searched for walked to my car people just kept adding cart after cart. (I guess the courtesy factor doesn't translate to finding another corral?) The parking lots at Walmart are very spacious (and they provide plenty of cart corrals unlike some stores I could name) but these carts were more than halfway across the roadway. As I got into my car and buckled up, I watched shoppers add to the line of carts, drivers maneuver around them without even a pause, and was even more amazed at the driver who squeezed his pickup truck into the space opposite the carts like it was the only vacant spot.


People are funny.