Shopping Carts

Here's something you can easily do to help fight higher prices at your local grocery store:

Every time you go to a store, bring a shopping cart or two in from the parking lot with you. If you're not going alone, have everyone coming into the store with you grab a cart and wheel it into the store with them. Drop off any extras in the cart area by the door.

It sounds like a small and worthless gesture, doesn't it? It isn't. If everyone walking into the store brought a single carriage in from the lot, there'd only be one round-up a day - at closing time - and it would be just a few dozen carts left from the last few shoppers. Even if only some people do it, it can still reduce the amount of time an employee needs to spend out in the parking lot. Remember that stores pass along overhead costs to customers. Hold down the overhead, and you help hold down prices.

And bringing in a cart isn't going to cost a kid his job, either. Store employees have to be taken off other jobs to fetch carriages; no one is ever hired specifically for Carriage Patrol.