I never return my grocery cart at the supermarket —haters can judge all they want
She wheelie just can’t be bothered.
Making a market run with the kids in tow can be a pain. From forcing fussy tots into the car, to taming temper tantrums while shopping then getting the little ones, as well as the groceries, into the backseat and retuning the cart to a corral — it’s a daunting task for overworked moms.
But one no-nonsense mama is refusing to partake in the most polite part of the process.
“I’m not returning my shopping cart,” married mom of two Leslie Dobson, a psychologist from Los Angeles, spat in an unflinching TikTok. “You can judge me all you want.”
The stone-cold psych continued explaining to her over 11 million viewers, “I’m not getting my groceries into my car, getting my children into the car and leaving them in the car to go return the cart.”
“So if you’re gonna give me a dirty look…F- -k off.”
Stunned social media spectators were wildly grossed out by Dobson’s ungracious grocery etiquette.
“Shopping cart return stations are all over the parking lot — so never really more than 20 seconds away and you still can’t be bothered?” questioned a critic.
“I’m a single disabled momma. I have a placard and thus park in the handicap spots. I rely on the cart to help me walk and still walk the cart to the corral and hobble back to my car,” a separate commenter chimed.
“The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing. To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task,” added another.
“Mom of a 6-year-old, 3-year-old and 9-month-old. I simply unload groceries, return cart WITH kids, and then load them in. Same way that we got out of car. Simple,” posed a disapproving parent, who echoed the sentiments of other moms who deemed Dobson “lazy.”
But research commissioned by Scientific American found that folks who fail to follow the unwritten rules of cart use aren’t inherently bad — just a little diva-like.
“People who never return their carts,” wrote authors of a 2017 report, “They believe it’s someone else’s job to get the carts or the supermarket’s responsibility, and show little regard for where the carts are left.”
“Supermarkets can try and guide our behavior with receptacles or cart attendants, but they’re competing with our own self-serving goals,” said the experts, “which, in this case, may be staying dry, keeping an eye on our children, or simply getting home as quickly as possible,”
“Not returning our shopping carts opens the door to throwing our circulars on the ground to parking haphazardly or in reserved spaces to other items that impact the quality of our experience at that establishment.”
Supermarket behavior has become a hot-button issue in recent months.
Digital debates over who’s responsible for placing a divider — the plastic baton that separates one shopper’s items from another’s foodstuffs — on the conveyor belt in the checkout line have explosively erupted all over social media.
And a Texas mom named Amy was branded “entitled” after holding up the checkout line in February when she let her toddler scan groceries during an ill-fated teachable moment.
Dobson, however, isn’t letting the cyber ridicule rock her resolve.
“I want women to feel empowered to trust their intuition if they feel unsafe, and ignore judgment,” wrote the brunette in response to nearly every disparaging comment beneath her post.
“Risk isn’t worth it and our lives are precious,” added Dobson. “I have seen lives destroyed. I hope you never don’t.”
