> So I approached the question of shopping cart abandonment the way I would any puzzle about human behavior: I collected data. My evidence came from an unlikely source: Cart Narcs, a small group whose mission is to encourage cart return, sometimes gently, sometimes less so.
CartNarc videos are selected for the reaction of the subject. Many videos where the subject just returned their cart or didn't get sufficiently agitated end up on the cutting room floor. It isn't a representative sample, there is heavy selection bias. No conclusions can be drawn from them despite the attempts of the author.
It isn't even "somewhat" scientific as the author states.
I have my study with the sample of one as well.
At Kroger, they have these shopping carts that locks their wheels if they were to be taken too far from the store. Well, sometimes they just lock without any reason, so what does the person do as they grab one as they're entering the store an it's locked? They just leave it there, and pull the next one.
And over time, the Kroger entrance is just full of shopping carts that are locked and every customer that comes in gets agitated because all the initial carts they interact with are locked.