It's derived from the "how do you treat the waiter" test in first dates, so it's not like this came from nowhere. Your small actions where "it doesn't matter" can have surprising revelations on your overall disposition in life. e.g., if you're reaction to being asked about a shopping cart is violence, that says a lot about how you treat many confrontations in your life.
I think they test distinct things.
Being nice to a waiter doesn't require additional work. Also, being a jerk to the waiter hurts another human being directly and is a strategic error because it is more likely to cause them to spit in your food than it is to get you better service.
In contrast, leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly. It just makes a supermarket run slightly less efficiently.
This could theoretically raise prices by increasing labor requirements, but it's not a linear relationship. Failing to return a cart would only increase prices if enough people do it to cross the threshold at which they would need to have an additional cart-collecting employee.
It's still an anti-social behavior, but the impact is more nebulous.
> leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly.
Found a cart leaver. :)
You stole their username :D
Gotta get ahead of the game !
> it is more likely to cause them to spit in your food than it is to get you better service.
I would count on the waiter not being a jerk, and trying to hurt people just because they are a jerk.
> In contrast, leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly. It just makes a supermarket run slightly less efficiently.
What? It is hardly any extra work, you also have walked the same way when taking the cart. And it annoys people after you, including yourself, when you come in the next day and find a shopping cart standing on your parking lot.
> Being nice to a waiter doesn't require additional work.
Maintaining a social interaction is intellectual more work, than pushing a cart around. This very much depends on your personal preference, to some people social interactions are a lot of work.
> Failing to return a cart would only increase prices if enough people do it to cross the threshold at which they would need to have an additional cart-collecting employee.
So you rely on all the other people not taking liberties, you should be allowed to do? What do you think you are?
>What? It is hardly any extra work, you also have walked the same way when taking the cart.
It depends on the store. If it's a very large parking lot, and you're parked at the far end of it, it can be a long walk to get back to your car. If the store didn't bother putting any designated cart-return locations in the lot (which happens a lot), then returning the cart means doubling your walking time. So it really is a lot of extra work, or at least time, so it is understandable why some people would avoid this extra work/time and take the easy way out.
>And it annoys people after you
Yes, but you don't ever see these people; they come after you've left. It's not like being rude to the waiter's face.
This whole category of decision making basically consists of taking observable things and then using them to infer other things despite the correlations often only being barely better than a coin toss. It's the same logic by which the police harass you more if you check more bad demographic checkboxes.
You can make an argument that it's different because the stuff being measured is at the other end of the "how easily can they change it" spectrum but that doesn't change the fundamental accuracy of the correlation. Something like this shouldn't be used for anything serious.