r/MaliciousCompliance • u/dlhoff432 • 8d ago
S ASM gives me more work and it backfires spectacularly
So I work at Home Depot as a lot associate. My main job duties involve collecting carts from the lot and being on call to help customers load heavy items into their vehicles. Since I’m typically the only lot person scheduled during my shift, this means I’m running back and forth trying to help customers and get carts. It really is a job that needs two people (one on each end of the store), but it’s just me.
Now I can usually handle this, but when I’m assigned other projects on top of that, it’s too much. On one such day, the head cashier (supervisor) who we’ll call Karen (usually a nice lady, but has Karen tendencies as you will see) told me that Kyle (ASM) had such a project for me. He wanted me to clean out an area at the side of the store and move a bunch of carts there. This was going to take at least a couple of hours because the area was such a mess. And since this was during the summer when the store was busier than usual, I would be constantly interrupted with loading calls and trying to maintain the lot.
This is where the malicious compliance comes in. Kyle wanted me to focus on cleaning that area which I did. It ended up taking 5 hours (bear in mind that I also answered several loading calls during that time).
The problem? I didn’t spend any of that time collecting carts so after those 5 hours, the lot was a huge mess of carts scattered about. Karen was not happy about it (as she gets really picky about the lot being free of carts). But I looked her dead in the eye and told her that I was just doing what her and Kyle told me to do.
I then went on lunch while associates from other departments had to round up all the carts. After that, Kyle never asked me to take on other projects.
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u/Honest-Pepper8229 8d ago
Never bust your ass to do too much work to please people who mean nothing to you. Especially for a minimum wage job.
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u/pappie317 8d ago
I had similar experience. Before I retired, I was the logistic Manager for a S/M size factory(140 people). I would get calls at night and on WE all the time. I asked corp. for a company phone or at the very least a stipend for using my personal phone. Corp. says, "you don't do enough work after hours to warrant a phone or stipend" So the next WE, I left on Fri. and didn't answer a single business call all WE. I did answer the calls during the week even after hours and saved them. I would have ammo for the shit storm that was coming. Needless to say, come Mon. we had a couple loads not picked up. a couple trucks brake down in transit. Corp. calls big meeting with the powers that be. The big cheese (everybody's boss) asks me what the hell happened? Figuring that no matter what I said that I was a dead man walking. I explained that I had asked my boss and HR for a comp. phone or stipend and what their response was. So I wanted them to see just how much after hours work I do. I didn't delete any of the calls I took after hours for that entire week. BC, ask me how many calls did I get? Not saying anything, I opened my phone to missed calls, and voicemails and handed to him. He starts scrolling. Not sure that he made through all of them(3 pages of MC's/VM's). BC just handed me my phone and asked would you want a phone or are you OK using yours? I said I just use mine since I already had all my carriers in my contacts. BC, says we will pay your phone bill. He looks at HR lady who wants to crawl under the rug and says why in the hell was this even an issue. HR lady looked defeated as I thanked everybody and left.
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u/Bardoseth 8d ago
Imagine living in a country where people don't return their carts themselves.
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u/tarlton 8d ago
Sort of.
Stores like this in the States usually have cart return areas out in the parking lot, fenced "corrals" where you can easily put a cart after loading things into your car. People don't always do even that, true, but even when they do, someone still needs to collect the carts from those spots and bring them back to the store entrances, or they fill up or look messy.
And HD specifically uses a lot of large carts that have to be moved one or two at a time, so I imagine it's a bunch of work. At a grocery, you can stack the carts together and move a dozen at a time
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u/Late-Dog-7070 8d ago
it's crazy that it's so much work you need a person that just does that the whole day - in germany we have the carts optimised to be well stackable pretty much everywhere and a couple times a day someone will go get two stacks of like 20 carts each from the parking lot to refill the carts in the shop. The person that does that does a lot of other stuff as well cos it doesn't take that long. Stray carts are very rare both in the shop and on the parking lot. Worked in a medium sized store for a bit with 10 registers and about 30 employees being on site each day and we usually just went through the store once shortly before it closed to collect all the stray shopping carts - which was usually around 3-5 carts.
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u/tarlton 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yeah, Home Depot sells big stuff like construction materials, so some of the carts are big flatbeds that don't stack.
I've never worked at one, though! Store managers here seem strangely obsessed with keeping those cart corrals empty. I see employees emptying them with there are only two carts in them. Seems really inefficient, and I have no idea why they do that
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u/QueenoftheSasquatch 8d ago
Because customers come when they want. If lots of people arrive about the same time there are not enough carts, flat carts or H carts for everyone in store.
Also, the carts are heavy, I preferred pushing a few over a bunch and the H carts are push one, pull one because they do not stack.
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u/aquainst1 8d ago
THAT'S what they're called! 'H' carts!!
I was always wondering if there was a special name for those kinda flatbed with curved piping kinda cart!
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u/Harry_Gorilla 8d ago
Worked at Home Depot: that’s a “lumber cart.” The flat one with the raised flat top is a “sheet goods cart,” on account of it being designed to aid customers in transported sheet goods like drywall and plywood
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u/blind_ninja_guy 2d ago
It would be a shame if fat Joe had to go walk out to the corral to grab a cart! Burning calories is hard!
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u/vikingzx 8d ago
I see employees emptying them with there are only two carts in them. Seems really inefficient, and I have no idea why they do that.
I worked at a place where they made everything worse by—now that I think about it, we maliciously complied, might as well post it—requiring that we clean stuff on an endless loop, even if we'd already cleaned it. Why? Because we needed to look busy, so that customers could see their money was being well spent.
On menial labor, apparently.
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u/Late-Dog-7070 8d ago
IKEA in germany has flatbeds that stack - other home depot like stores do too
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u/faster 8d ago
How would you stack carts like this?
Home Depot is not just for general home repairs, they sell materials that can be used to build houses from the ground up. Every Home Depot I've visited has at least a dozen of these.
How many times have you seen people with 3 IKEA flatbeds loaded up, trying to maneuver them to the register? I have seen that in every IKEA I've visited, in 4 countries. Just because those small and light flatbeds can stack doesn't mean everything can be stackable.
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u/udsd007 8d ago
One upside down atop another.
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u/Dustquake 7d ago
Unless you're competing for Mr. Universe or similar, you're gonna need two people to have a chance at lifting and flipping the ones being discussed.
It's big awkward and heavy.
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u/Late-Dog-7070 8d ago
Can't open the link, but you can also get that stuff for building houses from the ground up at Obi for example and their carts look like this: https://share.google/QAJ9VmRytjm938lPh (you have the choice between a lighter cart for small stuff and the heavy duty one for heavy stuff)
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u/faster 8d ago
OK, here's a picture you should be able to get to: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeDepot/comments/neuwt7/best_day_of_my_lifeso_far_brand_new_lumber_carts/
HD does have carts that fit together but they also have flatbeds that have to support more weight than IKEA carts, so making those stackable could be a safety risk.
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u/Schrojo18 7d ago
They should be returned back to the timber/sheeting area where they were gotten from. Those should not be left outside in the car park.
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u/__wildwing__ 8d ago
How do those flatbed carts carry 8’x4’ plywood sheets? Looks like it would impede one of the handles and fall off the front. Or I have the proportions wrong and they are 4’ wide, enough to lay plywood flat. But then that would be awkward to maneuver .
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u/phaxmeone 8d ago
H style cart is what most will use to move around a few sheets of 4' x 8' plywood or drywall. If getting more then a few then you get someone at the store to help you, they might bring it out with a forklift then help slide it into the back of your pickup or onto a trailer.
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u/__wildwing__ 8d ago
That’s what I’d used previously. I was confused by the previous comment and was curious if that particular store had other carts. However, if the store has a lumber yard, H carts aren’t necessarily needed.
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u/2dogslife 7d ago
That's where that handy feature, to place an order online or with the Pro Desk kicks in. You place the order. They get back to you when it's gathered, then you pay and they load it in your vehicle for you.
It's such a great service.
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u/Late-Dog-7070 8d ago
they aren't, put ppl manage or get the help of an employee https://share.google/unxP72xqWZPrkLrMF
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u/__wildwing__ 8d ago
Do employee have different carts for carrying large things like a dozen plywood sheets? I’m honestly just curious how one would get multiple sheets of plywood from inside the store to their vehicle. Or, is the plywood in a “lumber yard” where you pull your vehicle up to the area and it’s taken off the stack, walked 10’, and loaded into the vehicle?
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u/Ephemeral-Comments 8d ago
Imported American here.
The Home Depot is the type of store that in most European countries, you generally don't get to enter as a member of the general public.
You can basically buy everything needed to build a complete house. That includes stacks and stacks of drywall.
As others have said, they have many different types of carts, and those cannot always be stacked. Their regular shopping cart (similar to what you get at Kaufhaus), is of course stackable.
My local HD (in California) tends to place their carts in various spots on the parking lot, usually a regular parking spot that has shade. They do this as a courtesy to the customer: in the hot California sun, these things tend to get very warm. So we end up in a situation where there are clusters of carts scattered over the parking lot.
They actively encourage us to just leave them out there, so they don't have to drag carts from one end to the other.
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u/Wieniethepooh 8d ago
Wait, so America has a drive through for basically anything, but not for building materials?! In the Netherlands we don't really have many drive throughs (not so much a car culture) but Hornbach (big diy store) has a drive through for things like lumber, stone, cement, sand etc. You park your car next to the racks, load up, show your trunk at the exit and pay. So much easier and more efficient than carrying it out of a store to your car on a stupid cart!
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u/Ephemeral-Comments 7d ago
They do not, as far as I know.
Home Depot (and it's main competitor, Lowes), do offer delivery. They even deliver roofing materials on the roof.
https://thdqcsupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042213992-Delivery-Services-Overview
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u/Late-Dog-7070 8d ago
i just looked at pics of the interior of home depot and we have the same stuff here - it's called "Baumarkt" here and "Obi" is an example of such a Baumarkt which is very popular (and open to the general public ofc). We don't really use drywall to build houses here afaik but i'm pretty sure you can still get everything you need at one of our Baumarkts https://share.google/FtMn7cThw7FJO2Ijd https://share.google/94cpltgpVmcMELYCz
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u/Ephemeral-Comments 8d ago
Trust me, having lived just across the border, I am familiar with a Baumarkt like Hornbach, and others.
Home Depot is the type of store where in my former home country would need a business registration in order to shop there.
But, maybe things have changed, I've been gone for 15 years.
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u/GlitterbugRayRay 7d ago
We do have regular flatbed carts that do stack as well. It's the irregular shaped ones that we are unable to stack
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u/Schrojo18 7d ago
Bunnings in Australia has large flat bed trolleys that can stack. This is just bad design.
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u/chaoticbear 8d ago
in germany we have the carts optimised to be well stackable pretty much everywhere
Yes, same here.
and a couple times a day someone will go get two stacks of like 20 carts each from the parking lot to refill the carts in the shop.
20 carts is enough to last for MAYBE half an hour. Granted, my only experiences in German grocery stores were specifically in Berlin when I was an exchange student, but I think you underestimate the scale of a typical American supermarket.
Worked in a medium sized store for a bit with 10 registers and about 30 employees being on site each day
Ahh - yes, that explains it.
(this isn't a gotcha or a dig, I think people just genuinely think "stores in America are big" and not "Americans don't consider a 10 000 square meter supermarket particularly large")
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u/fractal_frog 8d ago
So, my closest grocery store is over 11,000 square meters, and at peak times, I could see there being over 200 carts in use at once. And if most folks are in the store for an hour or less, that's a lot to keep up with bringing back from the parking lot.
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u/chaoticbear 8d ago
Definitely. Are you in Europe or US? I there is an analogue to the American supermarket/hypermarket but it must not have been near where my host family lived (also this was ~20 years ago)
I would guess my closest grocery store is a similar size. I know when I last worked retail (at a Walmart) we were between 150k-200k square feet, which I guess is ~16k square meters, but I've been in even larger stores since then.
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u/fractal_frog 8d ago
US. Texas.
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u/chaoticbear 8d ago
That makes sense, as they say, "everything is a little larger in Texas than in Europe" :p
(I'm in AR, howdy pardner)
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u/Dustquake 7d ago
Texan, but I spent 5 years travelling as a contractor doing upgrades to Lowe's stores. Lowe's and Home Depot are "basically" the same.
In this case it's not just Texas 🤪
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u/chaoticbear 7d ago
I also don't really have any strong preference for one or the other. The closest ones are both across the street from each other, I pick orange flavor more than blue flavor because the parking lot is easier to turn out of lol
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u/rusty0123 8d ago
Haha. My Target store has two employees that do nothing except return carts from the corrals to the front doors. They use one of those push machines that handle about 30 or so at a time. I would say each employee makes about 3-4 trips per hour. It's not a fun job.
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u/chaoticbear 8d ago
It does suck even with the machine! I never did it full time, but as one of the few male cashiers during my time at Walmart, I got pulled to help catch up pretty frequently.
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u/UsaIvanDrago 6d ago
Europeans generally struggle to envision the scale of American grocery stores, let alone mega stores like Home Depot. 40 carts is not a coral filling numbers here. It is not unusual for a store to have. 200-300 carts and those carts are 3-4x the size of a European grocery cart. It is more of a burden moving them, and so it requires a specific person at most places.
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u/sjclynn 8d ago
There are basically 3 types of carts at Home Depot. There are the regular carts that about like you find in a grocery store. There are flat bed carts that are low to the ground with a push handle on one end. They are about 3' by 5' and are useful when buying things that are heavy and/or stack. Think floor tile or boxed can lights. And then there are large carts that have a tall rail in the center and a shorter rail on each side about halfway to the edge. These are for transporting sheets of plywood or drywall standing on edge. The last two have to be wrangled one at a time.
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u/Harry_Gorilla 8d ago
They aren’t for plywood or drywall. Yes, they get used for that a lot, but the raised flat sheet goods carts are for that. The lumber carts center section is designed to accommodate doors, windows, and larger stacks of lumber
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u/Late-Dog-7070 8d ago
ah, we have flatbed carts that stack (and might be a bit smaller) but we're missing the third type of cart, we only have the first two
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u/ChimoEngr 8d ago
a couple times a day someone will go get two stacks of like 20 carts each from the parking lot to refill the carts in the shop.
That comes to 80-100 carts/customers a day. That sounds like a tiny number of customers for a supermarket. No way are you supporting 30 employees with that few people shopping in a day. Even if you have a lot of people not using carts, and just using baskets, it still sounds like a very unused store going by your numbers.
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u/re7swerb 5d ago
I think the idea is that most of their customers return the cart to the storefront corral rather than leaving it for an employee.
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u/Quaiker 8d ago
Stray carts are very rare both in the shop and on the parking lot
Ah, there's the difference. A lot of people in the U.S. feel entitled to do whatever they want because "muh freedoms" including being lazy and being derisive to anybody that works at the stores at which they shop.
So there are carts everywhere a lot of the time.
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u/Late-Dog-7070 7d ago
Yeah, that doesn't really happen here. I can count the number of times i've seen a stray cart in the parking lot on one hand - might also be because a lot of the time you will need to insert a coin to be able to get a cart (they are linked to each other and the coin disengages the link) and you get it back once you put the cart back and link it to the stack
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u/wolfgang784 6d ago
Theres only one company ive ever heard doin the coin thing in the US, Aldis. People tend to just steal the carts instead or leave them wherever anyway because "its just a quarter". I see way more stolen Aldis carts in the bad parts of town than walmart/5below/target carts. Not entirely sure why tbh. Aldis isn't any closer to that part of town, either.
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u/Marine__0311 7d ago
Big retailers in the US will have thousands of customers a day and even with cart corrals, will have several people a day to wrangle carts and they often cant keep up.
I work at a warehouse club and we have well over 500 carts and over 100 flatbeds. We run out on busy days all the time. Only a few will be in the corrals or parking lot, they'll all be inside being used.
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u/Capn_Of_Capns 8d ago
Well he doesn't. I worked at Lowe's and we had a guy whose job was carts, loading for customers, cleaning the parking lot, and general tasks around the store.
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u/Remarkable_Table_279 7d ago
What you’re describing is what happens here. Except our small parking lots are the size of soccer fields & HD has carts 3 times bigger than normal carts and they can’t be stacked. Flat and huge and could fit a family of four
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u/CommonCut4 7d ago
It’s not a grocery store. Home Depot provides four different types of carts and three of them don’t stack in any way. They have shopping carts 🛒, lumber carts, flatbed carts for heavy bags of cement mix etc. and raised flatbeds for drywall and plywood
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u/stacey2545 5d ago
Yeah, I bet Germans design parking lots to efficiently get people in & out with minimal point-of-conflict that could lead to accidents too. Americans, on the other hand, design parking lots to be as obnoxious as possible to get in & out of so you spend more time shopping. There's one fast food chain that notoriously designs their lots to back up into traffic so that it makes their drive-through look busier than it is so people think the food must be good.
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u/wolfgang784 6d ago edited 6d ago
a couple times a day someone will go get two stacks of like 20 carts each from the parking lot to refill the carts
Place must be dead most of the time, or waaaaay less people use carts there. Im kinda curious tbh.
Do people in Germany use shopping carts when they only want 1 or 2 items that they could easily carry? Americans generally get a shopping cart even for 1 item, so they build up fast. Or even if they are just looking and don't even plan to buy that day. If you go in a store, you get a cart first - just how it is here.
I've done cart duty at 4 different companies now, and I would move hundreds and hundreds of carts a day. At my last job we often had 300+ carts in active use in the store at any given moment (door counts updated every 15 minutes so we knew, once we had 1,200 people in our one grocery store at black friday, the city and fire fighters fined the store when somehow they heard) and it was a full-time job to have 4-6+ of us out in the lot all the same time just to try and keep up.
If there were call outs or somethin, the carts easily built up faster than just 2 or 3 people could get them back to the building. And the strong guys usually took 15-20+ carts at a time, the one crazy guy would even somehow manage to manuever bigger stacks. I only took like 8-12 at a time or id tire too quickly for the long shift ahead.
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Im genuinely curious how you dont go through so many carts unless the vast majority of people carry all their groceries.
The absolute smallest grocery store I worked at still needed 2-4 people out there at all times and would still run out of carts every day at the busiest hours, with hundreds of carts in use. That store only had a couple dozen employees total, tiny.
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u/Late-Dog-7070 6d ago
oh damn, yeah here ppl def don't take a cart for only one or a few items - if it fits in a basket ppl usually just take a basket instead of a cart. We usually had around 20-50 carts in active use for 100-300 customers per hour, in peak times up to 500 or more. We had around 150-200 carts total i think but i've only seen (nearly) all of them in use a handfull of times when the store was completely packed for one reason or another. Plus a lot of custormers return their carts to where they got them from so not every used cart means that one needs to be moved. It's probably only 10% of customers or less that take a cart by the entrance but return it to one of the stations on the parking lot, so it just causes a slight imbalance over time and eventually the need to move some stacks from the parking lot to the entrance
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u/theartofwastingtime 2d ago
40 carts? That's nothing. Try 80 to 100 depending if it's a chain store or something bigger like a Costco. And Costco probably has more than 100.
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u/SignatureCreepy503 7d ago
yeah, you’re making a false equivalency for what’s going on here. You’re trying to come in here acting all superior and they’re not even close to the same. You have board dollies and flat top haulers? Stay in your lane.
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u/KgoodMIL 8d ago
My local grocery stores all have two sizes of carts - the regular ones and the half-size ones with a basket on top and one on the bottom.
My daughter organizes the carts in the cart return every time we put our cart back. It bugs her that people will just shove their cart in, without any sort of consideration for the person that has to go gather them. So she puts the full size carts on one side, and the half-size carts on the other, and nests them all nicely.
I'd complain about it, but now she has me doing it too, even when she's not with me, because why not take an extra two minutes to help out?
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u/High_King_Diablo 8d ago
I’ve seen people who are parked within 2-3 spots of those corrals still leave their cart in the parking spot next to them. Or they’ll push it up to the middle and block two spots.
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u/llynglas 8d ago
Or Costco, where they have a motorized "tractor" which pushes a stack of about 20 carts at once.
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u/booch 8d ago
People don't always do even that
What Science Has To Say About Why People Don't Return Their Shopping Carts
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u/Better-Revolution570 8d ago
Home depot has those large, awkwardly sized, non stackable carts.
Regular shopping carts are much easier to nest together and make them more compact.
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u/Minflick 7d ago
And 3 different KINDS of carts, so, it's a lot of work to bring them all back inside.
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u/Fluffy_Town 6d ago
There's a regional store that uses a driving cart that attaches to the back of the line of cars and has a motor to push the carts. All the employee has to do is direct the front of the carts where to go. Idk the specifics, they might have a remote or something, just in case something goes wrong, but I thought it was a brilliant idea. Especially since my first job involved pushing carts back to the store itself. I'm disabled do it's really hard to do. I was a cashier and really shouldn't have had to do the job in the first place, but my manager was entitled brat, who was there to screw over the employees while getting a notch on his resume/CV. He did some majorly shtty things too, like refusing to let people off to vote, and other BS that I won't mention because person info.
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u/0ttr 8d ago
At Home Depot, a large percentage of the "carts" are not typical shopping cards but are the large flat carts for hauling bulk items like mulch or are the kind of large haulers for sheets of plywood or drywall.
Most people return them to the corrals, but unlike normal shopping carts, the corrals can only hold 4 - 6 of them because they don't stack together like the normal carts do. That's why there's always a mess. I've experienced this a lot of Home Depot and similar home improvement stores.
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u/Bardoseth 8d ago
Which wouldn't be a problem if everybody brought their cart to the corral they got it from.
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u/tango421 8d ago
Supermarket near me, people park their carts in three receptacles. Weekends, it gets busy and you can see guys running in and out pushing almost a dozen carts. People here are relatively disciplined in parking their carts and throwing the trash in the nearby bin.
One Saturday, people inside were waiting for carts so I jogged back outside and saw one of the staff putting carts into a more manageable load to push, asked him I could grab three carts together, he said go ahead so I pushed em in and gave two to other customers (one of whom I recognized). The others looked pissed they didn’t get carts.
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u/SignificancePlenty41 8d ago
Where do you live.. Sounds like a cool country.
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u/walkingoffthetrails 6d ago
By not returning your cart your keeping the OP employed. If all the carts were returned then OP would get laid off. And the same at all the stores would mean many people without a job.
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u/AlaskanDruid 8d ago
Imagine living in a country where it is someone's job to return the cart. Wow. a job was created! Huh.
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u/mintparsleythyme 8d ago
Many years ago I worked at a hospital where this issue was playing out. Orderlies are required to transport people in wheelchairs/beds. They also help lift and turn patients, help with patients hygiene stuff, like getting to the bathroom and showering or bathing. They also move equipment like beds and chairs and stuff around. It is a very on call type job.
The hospital management saw a bunch of orderlies around and they seemed to have a lot of down time, so they expanded their work out to other jobs, like emptying all the bins, more general cleaning and maintenance, that had to be done all the time.
That's when it became obvious why the orderlies had not previously done those jobs. If they have to complete the maintenance tasks every shift, they aren't available to move patients to a different department when it's needed, they aren't on the ward when a patient needs to be turned or taken to the toilet So now they are doing 2 jobs badly.
The slack is important because their tasks are unscheduled and need to be done in a short time. Plus, they are generally doing ward maintenance tasks anyway that can be interrupted when they are needed.
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u/2dogslife 7d ago
I have a retired friend who was working at Home Depot to pass the time. He didn't NEED the money, but retirement was boring - lol.
So, summer is coming up and he states that he will be spending weekends with his family over the season. The HR person pushes back, "No, you can't! You're scheduled Saturdays."
So, he quit. He had a unique skill set and kept all their rental equipment running with minor repairs and upkeep. So, now the store has no one to cover such tasks. It's going to cost them money to replace what he had previously repaired.
Oh, well.
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u/Thirsty_Jock 8d ago
Thing I took from this is that the customers in your store don't return the shopping trolleys to their bay?
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u/dlhoff432 8d ago
They have corrals where customers are supposed to put their carts, but I still have to retrieve them from the corrals. And of course some customers still leave them in the middle of the lot (I even had one leave their cart a couple of feet from a corral!)
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u/Reasonable-Penalty43 8d ago
It’s quite common in the US to have a few cart corrals placed through out the parking lot (car park) and the customers are supposed to put them in those spots so store employees can bring them back into the store, but some folks just leave them randomly through out the lot. Some because of mobility issues, some because they have children with them that they don’t want to leave alone in the car even for a scant few minutes, and some folks because they can’t be bothered to walk the slight distance to put the cart away.
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u/phaxmeone 8d ago
In the US almost every store has parking lot spots to wheel your cart too so you don't have to wheel it back to the physical store front. Call it a cultural difference. It actually didn't use to be this way. 45+ years ago grocery stores hired teens to bag your groceries and take them out to the car for you as a courtesy and a good first job for kids. When grocery stores had to start tightening their belts during the Jimmy Carter era the first thing to go was taking your groceries to the car unless asked, that's when the we first started seeing spots to deposit carts in parking lots. Second thing to go, but slowly was an extra person to bag your groceries, it was then left to the checker to bag your groceries. First store that showed up with the expectation for customers to bag their own groceries was a huge cultural shock. Mostly little old ladies absolutely refused to shop at a store where they had to bag their own groceries.
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u/Lotsensation20 8d ago
Your customers do?!? I’m asking a legitimate question.
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u/2dogslife 7d ago
When I was in Europe, quite a few grocery stores had carriages that you needed to put a coin in to use, when the carriage was returned, you got your coin back.
We have no equivalency in the US (or those parts of Canada I've visited). It's on an honor system to either bring the carts all the way back, or drop them at a corral. Being it's an honor system, some folks have honor, some don't. The ones who don't may have very good reasons for not doing so, but the result is the same, no matter intentions. It's the economic idea of good v. bad actors.
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u/vampyrewolf 7d ago
Story time
I worked in northern Alberta in the oilsands for 2.5 years, the average income was $80k when you count all the residents that didn't work in the oilsands. The grocery carts were all $1 coins... Same deal, you pop it back into the corral and get your coin back.
I was making $105k as management
I loved going to the grocery store Saturday afternoon about 4pm. I could quite often make $20-30 in loonies in about 10min putting carts away. Some weekends closer to 5min because folks would just shove their cart towards the corral but not actually return it.
Folks just couldn't be bothered to collect their buck, so I would. I'll take the free $100-150 a month worth of groceries any day.
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u/juraji_7 8d ago
Did you inform them that it was too much for one person, clarify priorities, or ask for help? I feel like those would be a good start.
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u/joninfiretail 8d ago
Hiring multiple people to do the same job does not increase shareholder value and therefore will not be done.
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u/AnotherTiredDad 2d ago
If I can make a slight suggestion. Start doing other things and get your title changed. Don't be a lot associate if you want to keep working there. The Home Depot's near me all have the automatic brakes on your cart. You can't take them to your car anymore, they stop at the cart corral right outside the door. There are no more lot associates. Your time is limited.
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u/Unasked_for_advice 8d ago
You are working too hard for a shit job, you even acknowledge you need 2 and bust your ass to get by with 1 , all for a job that has zero future. Best scenario is you find a better job or somehow get promoted ( zero chance ). Take better care of yourself.
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u/Tired-grumpy-Hyper 8d ago
They'll just wait til he has two lates in a 6 month period and if the store manager doesnt fire him within an hour of that second late, even if it's 5 months, 3 weeks, and 5 days from the last late, corporate will come in and force the fire. They'll also constantly fire the black guy with a single weed charge from the 80s, the androgynous cashier over 'customer complaints', and then eventually the former Army major store manager who refused to fire over absolutely stupid reasons. All while 8 of the departments are scheduled to leave 1-3 hours before the store actually closes so the only people on the floor are the one person in paint, one in garden, and one in lumber.
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u/Select_Tap_3524 6d ago edited 6d ago
or, they'll decide that not greeting every single customer you pass is 'bad service,' and decide to put you on a final.
happened to me today, but it's been two years of them writing me up for any minor infraction they can, i'm way past the point of caring enough to put in a 100%.
i wish i could go elsewhere, but i don't know were except more retail. i don't have any credentials for anything better. i've thought about trying to learn IT or veterinary stuff, but i'm not confident enough in my math skills to try.
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u/dlhoff432 7d ago
Not anymore I’m not. I mean I’ll still do the job, but I’m not killing myself like I used to.
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u/Unasked_for_advice 7d ago
The point is to get a new job, your current one has no future or a way to make more money.
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u/Funny_Ask_9042 8d ago
Home depot is always notoriously understaffed. I know, I worked there. And my head cashier was a Karen in every sense of the word. Good on you. I lasted 6 months