I argue that empathy, and the sympathy and compassion that flow from it, are the only things a person can be rightly judged by. It matters not one’s wealth, race, skill, ambition, charm, etc. Those are nice to have and can make life easier, but they don’t make a person better or worse. It only matters that they care about others, and anyone that cares about others and acts like it is a great person even if mistakes have been made.
If you think you’re a loser because you don’t have a girl/boyfriend and live with your parents or something but you care about others, you are a far greater person than Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or anyone like that to be certain.
They say that it’s the ultimate test of selflessness, because it doesn’t benefit you and there’s no recognition for it.
But does it cancel out the selflessness if I’m now thinking that every time I return a cart? “If someone sees me, they’ll know how selfless I am…”
That’s why shopping carts in Germany are coin operated.
You only get your coin back, if you return the cart.
I made a bypass tool so I can know that when I return them it’s due to moral superiority and not base greed.
I take the ones people haven’t bothered to lock back in. My moral superiority knows no bounds.
Oh yeah? well!
Sometimes I round them all up, take the coins, and donate them anonymously to orphans with cancer.
While that is true they seem to die out. Older Shops still have the but during modernisation works, they usually get swapped out
Our nearby store just used inserts that disabled the feature. The chains are still on.
Well you gotta have the chain. What else are you going to fidget with when at the store?
You are right, it’s better that way. 40% of all customers would otherwise choose their penis.
I do tend to tie the chain around my penis, as it is the custom of the times
I had a teacher in highschool that presented the philosophical argument that no one ever does anything that is truly selfless. The argument was exactly what you mentioned, that if someone is doing something that appears selfless, they’re actually doing it in hopes that someone notices and thinks more highly of them.
This would have been an interesting rebuttal to the argument. If you return a shopping cart in an empty parking lot, does that make you selfless? Kind of like a modern version of a tree falling in a forest…
i don’t think true selflessness exists, but i also think that is completely and utterly irrelevant.
Everything is fundamentally fueled by selfishness, but it seems to be a fundamental truth of the universe that cooperation is optimal for an individual if they can achieve it.
for example cooperation is the thing that allows us and animals like ants to be so hilariously more successful than other species, and on an ecosystem level everyone is cooperating since their chemical structures are compatible. If something were to evolve to use mirrored sugar (which is incompatible with the version of sugar molecules we use) then they’d have nothing but themselves to eat and thus promptly starve.
That just reminded me of the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The author talks about how we beat out other Homo species not due to our intelligence or our strength, but due to our ability to cooperate among large groups. If you took 10 humans and pitted them in a fight against 10 Neanderthals or even 10 chimps, we would lose. But if you took 200 humans against 200 of them, we would win every time.
i would caution against taking that as gospel, afaik we don’t really know why other species died out yet, and we have very clear evidence that our species interbred a whole heck of a lot.
it’s probably a whole host of reasons that led to us surviving alone, including stuff like being able to survive on very little food, and hey maybe we to some degree simply interbred to the point that their species dissolved into ours.
imagine being a buff neanderthal and encountering these strange lithe people with less hair and suddenly that pretty girl in another neanderthal tribe you had your eyes on is completely forgotten.
Honestly unless you believe there is inherent good in doing that (religion mostly, morality for some) then no. It doesn’t make sense to work for free, to not have returns.
If recognition is a form of payment then good on some people, though I personally think recognition can be a drug, and religion justifies my good actions for me much better.
Point is keep on doing good, and maybe consider that the slightly tidier and cleaner space you leave was worth the effort. Surely someone would have seen you and thought “damn, I should do that next time”
I worked at grocery stores for 7 years in my late teens and early 20s. People who don’t use cart corrals deserve nothing.
Grocery store owner: “Looks like customer altruism is ramping up again, time to lay off some more employees!”
If they could find a way to apply the same “self checkout” solution to cart return, you know they would in a heartbeat!
And I’m European
I bring loose carts into the store on my way in, usually don’t use a cart since I bring bags
actual marriage material
Honestly, that’s probably not a bad litmus test. New first date recommendation: take them shopping and see if they return their shopping cart or not. Could save a lifetime of misery!
I still feel bad about the one time I didn’t return a shopping cart.
A creepy guy was hitting on me and wouldn’t take no for an answer, didn’t feel safe to go anywhere but in my car and the fuck out of there.
That’s on the dude, not you. As a larger guy who has never not returned a cart in his life, I’d have done the same lmao
This is unironically how i judge if someone is a decent person. It costs you nothing, and requires minimum effort, and yet most people I meet just can’t be bothered. I don’t even work in retail, nor have I ever, but it just annoys the hell outta me that people are that inconsiderate. It’s not like Sam Walton himself is asking you to put the cart away for him. When you don’t do it some minimum wage employee has to chase them down. You’re not better than them. You’re capable of doing the minimal task asked of you.
As previously stated, I’ve met way to many people like this. Pox on the Earth. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Reminds me of shopping cart theory.
Words of wisdom right there.
That’s gotta be the only decent thing to ever come out of 4chan
Plenty of good things come out of 4chan, it’s just that the bad ones outnumber them by a lot.
Kind of like with humans in general.
I would like to offer a different take on this, even if I’ll be downvoted to hell for it…
So, using Walmart in the US as an example:
They hire people to push carts from the cart returns back to the building and those people are also responsible for snagging the stragglers as well. By putting the cart back in the correct place you are reducing the amount of work that an hourly employee has to do during their shift, thereby reducing their potential hours and potential pay.
For me, it’s the same reason I hate the self checkout, because I’m not getting a discount for running a self serve register but Walmart is saving money by not paying an employee to do it.
I get how using a self checkout is nice because I don’t have to deal with a human, but the human I no longer have to deal with is another potential employee that was getting a paycheck…
I dRoP mY LiTtEr oN tHe fLoOr So SoMeBoDy HaS a JoB!
