Shopping Trolleys and Clarity

Brains in neutral?

           

 

At regular intervals there will be an item in the news reporting on supermarket trolleys either in a stream or cluttering up the neighbourhood.

There will be the inevitable demand that either the local council or the supermarkets should clear this up and behave more responsibly.

Not to digress too far, the supermarkets spend a lot of money collecting these wayward trolleys, but it is simply impossible for them to locate every trolley hidden behind some shed or in some stream, unless somebody contacts them.

Let us for the moment consider the purpose of these trolleys, and I must confess that I appear to be one of only a few people who has the view I am about to express.

Supermarkets spend a huge amount of money to provide convenience to shoppers by supplying a range of different trolleys to suit our needs. From Baby Seats to wheelchair friendly trolleys, deep ones and shallow ones, you name it they supply it.

These trolleys belong to the supermarket and are there for our convenience during shopping and to transport our goods to our vehicles in the parking lot. It appears clear to me that anybody who removes a trolley from the premises of a shopping centre is guilty of theft.
The trolleys are not supplied to enable one to push your goods to your home, where the trolley is then abandoned.

Yet somehow it appears that everybody now accepts this to be normal behaviour while pointing fingers at the supermarkets for not keeping our neighbourhoods tidy.

Even in the parking lots, as the above pictures shows, some people are too lazy to move their trolleys to an appropriate storage location, provided for that purpose.

They are quite happy to just abandon the trolley either in a parking bay or on any verge that might be closer than the proper storage spaces provided.

How many scrapes and dents have you found in your car as a result of people being careless with trolleys?

Who are these people and why do they behave like this?

You might imagine that this might be a special type of person and you would be wrong, these are people who simply do not care.

The pictures above where taken during the last month at the same location.

Ask yourself, what the person was thinking when they parked the last or second last trolley in the pictures. Did they not notice that they are intruding into the drive way ?

The question raised by both the trolley "borrower" and trolley "parker" is to what extent we are prepared to accept the normalisation of thoughtless behaviour, in business or in our personal lives. 

Thoughtless behaviour will wreck any project and ultimately, potentially any business.

I would recommend you read The No asshole rule by Robert Sutton.