Should we Say Good-Bye to the Shopping Cart Theory?

Can you determine if someone is a good or a bad person based on how they return (or refuse to return) their shopping cart? The shopping cart theory was popularized by the internet, but is it the scale we should be using when measuring someone’s character? 

I have (unfortunately) been working in the retail field for twenty years. I’ve held many jobs within the field, but I’ve always done my best to avoid accepting clothing-related jobs. My current job is as a salesperson at a cosmetics counter in a department store. I make commissions on my sales, but recently I haven’t been able to make decent wages because of changes within the store. 

We recently got a new store manager, who came in like a wrecking ball. He decided the beauty team wasn’t helping enough, so he assigned us new responsibilities that took us away from the beauty counter. He told us that we had to perform an entire hour per day of non-commissioned tasks, like folding shirts. That hour was usually during busy hours, so it cut my commission drastically. 

One day, as I was folding shirts, two elderly ladies stopped by the table I was working at. They noticed me with the folding board and still unfolded multiple shirts I had recently arranged on the table. They acted as though I wasn’t there as they tore through piles of shirts, looking for a size large. When they were gone, I noticed they had even left some T-shirts on the floor.

The customers unfolding shirts reminded me of a similar experience I’d had earlier in my retail career. I was working as a cashier when a couple came through my line to check out. We had a bag rack that moved to allow the customer to grab their bags and load them into their cart. The woman’s boyfriend or husband began loading their items into the cart while the woman stopped him. She told him that was my job. She likely said that because I was a young, pretty girl, but her words stuck with me.

I’ve heard similar remarks multiple times throughout my career. From mothers telling their kids to leave a mess behind because ‘someone gets paid to clean it’, to people outright smirking at staff as they made a mess and telling the staff that's what they (the staff) were there for. Customers will drop clothing onto the floor and leave it, or unfold an entire table of shirts because ‘someone gets paid to clean up after them’. 

I’ve watched customers bring shopping carts full of clothing into the fitting room, only to walk away without buying anything. Customers will grab every size of a dress and head to the fitting room, only to leave whatever they tried on in a pile on the floor. 

The fitting room situation has become so horrendous that the store manager decided to close the fitting room a half hour before closing time. This move has drawn lots of negativity from customers, and even a few instances of profanities being hurled at associates. 

The fitting room and state of the store in general isn’t the only issue. This week alone, I’ve had multiple instances of customers interrupting me during a makeup consultation to demand that I check them out. They seem unbothered by the fact that another guest is being helped and even become angry if you ignore them or tell them you are helping a guest. One customer even told me they didn’t have time to wait for someone to get their makeup done, before demanding that I check them out instead of helping the guest who was there first. 

Then there’s that dreaded question of ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ It’s a question every retail worker gets asked five to twenty times a day. The question itself isn’t harmful, but the execution of the question is. Many times I will be speaking to another customer when someone blurts out, “Where’s the bathroom?!” as if they are about to 'go in their pants' right there. 

Then there are the customers who decide it's okay to be rude because something about the store bothered them. They may not have understood the coupons or liked the price of an item, but it’s suddenly the cashier’s fault. The classic customer insult, “Are you new?” is never far from a customer’s lips when retail rage hits.  

This treatment of retail workers is especially disappointing because the 2020 pandemic shifted shopping from in-store to online. Many staff members were furloughed or let go entirely. Some retail stores raised their starting pay but opted to hire fewer workers. There’s no longer an employee in each section of the store, and self-checkouts have risen in popularity. Older customers have a tough time grasping the current state of the retail world and often complain that ‘no one wants to work anymore’ while that's far from the truth. 

Stores no longer hire the amount of staff members that they did in the past. Instead, they add more duties for their existing workers. Fewer staff members doesn’t mean the store provides more hours for the existing staff. Staff members have to check their schedules daily to ensure their hours haven’t been cut. This leaves fewer people to help with the overwhelming demand brought forth by massive returns and the disheveled state of the fitting room. 

Although the employees face all the above obstacles, the customers either don’t notice or aren’t bothered by employee struggles. Some even believe it’s fine to make a mess in a store or treat retail workers with disrespect because ‘they should have gone to college’. 

This is why I think it’s time to throw out the shopping cart theory and replace it with something that measures how we treat service workers. No one deserves to go home exhausted because one shopper decided to try on seventy-five pieces of clothing or unfold every shirt on a table. People deserve to be treated kindly, regardless of their job title or education level.