Hard to believe. Is it so difficult to realize that there’s only one sane solution?
I’ve got it. She’s used to having someone else do her shopping for her (otherwise she’d be driving an old banger like the rest of us) and she’d never been trained in cart usage/storage.
Oh, wait. According to Rep. Dreier (R-Ca) I’m committing class warfare by saying things like that. Never mind. 
You could assume that her car is more of an old banger today than it was yesterday at this same time. ;)
People who are too precious to put their carts in the generously provided corrals really irritate me. In this particular case, the nearest corral wasn’t more than 12 feet away. And her dogged determination to NOT USE IT was breathtaking.
Steph, I think the metal key idea is brilliant. It should be done here, too. Very democratic solution.
Rep Dreier has a little silver spoon sticking out of his mouth and I’m sure he expects, as his due, all the perks that go along with it. Why is it that Republicans can only frame positions and arguments in militaristic terms?
I laughed today as I was ever so nicely putting my cart back in the corral along with the 2 others I found surrounding my car when I came out of the grocery store--I could see your post in my mind and could not have done anything less!!
Years ago when we lived in the city, the market I shopped at checked you out, bagged your groceries, gave you a claim ticket and then your groceries went on a conveyer belt type thing. You went out, got into your car, pulled up and someone loaded them into the trunk for you. Perfect--I loved it and wished it still worked that way!! No carts in the parking lot!!
Posted by cyn on 05/12/06 at 09:00 PM
Tenacity?
This reminded me more of a Jeff Foxworthy line about automatically deducing IQ points ...
;)
Posted by
LOL! That, too. But you have to admit there was tenacity...the sheer determination to save steps by not putting that cart where it belonged even if it cost her 200 more steps than if she’d just done the deed from the start. There should be special awards for people like that. 
Cyn, you have built up a reserve of parking lot karma.
There was a grocery store that had the conveyer belt thingy when I lived in New York state. Star Market, I think. They decided to go with that solution because too many people were running off with their carts! Being in the middle of a city neighborhood, people had a tendency to wheel their groceries home in the carts and then the carts would just sit on street corners waiting for someone to pick them up. They instituted a policy of no carts allowed out of the store. I liked having the conveyer service. No one around here does it, though.
Gee Kate, maybe we should go into business together and provide the ultimate grocery shopping service. You still get to do “hands on” as opposed to using PeaPod, but once you pay, we do the rest. HA!
Posted by cyn on 05/14/06 at 08:37 PM
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We got a solution for that here: you have to put a piece of metal into the cart to unlock it from the rank, and then you have to put the cart into another one to get your piece of metal back. That piece of metal can either be a coin or a slug. Sometimes stores give out a slug on a keychain. My boyfriend has a keyring from a car dealership with a slug that’s held on magnetically.
Of course, the other solution liberally employed in Amstedam is that the supermarket doesn’t have a parking lot, and you can’t take the cart out of the shop.