I was once 75 cents ahead by the time I made it inside of an Aldi in Columbus, Ohio because there were 3 free-range carts in the parking lot that I returned. Three was a lot -- most days I only found one cart hanging out in the parking lot.
In my current neck of the woods things are a bit different. There's never any carts roaming the parking lot, and there's usually carts with quarters already in them, parked properly up by the door.
(I often leave one parked with a quarter like that myself, but it's not because of some "pay it forward" quasi-altruistic purpose or something. Sometimes I just want to pick my groceries up out of the cart and walk to the car and I just don't have enough free hands to deal with retrieving the quarter. So I line up the cart with the others, grab my bag or two of things, and shove the cart the rest of the way home with my hip.)
I don’t go to Aldi because of the coin thing in the shopping carts. I went there once, didn’t have at change, and had to carry everything until my arms got full, then just left. I’m not going to carry change with me all the time on the off chance I decide to go to Aldi. Every other store lets me take a cart for free, and I return it because it’s the right thing to do and I want them to remain free.
They are still free, since it is a deposit, not a fee. Also don't you need to put in a coin, when you use a locker, in a museum or the library, or the train station? This is ubiquitous here. You don't need to use a real coin, they are also fake plastic coins for only this purpose, you can get everywhere, and also tools, which you put in to unlock, and then can immediately pull out again.
I get that it’s a deposit, but it still means I have to carry a coin, or some kind of slug. It’s one more thing to carry or think about, that other places don’t require.
Museums, libraries, and train stations aren’t places I go weekly, like a grocery store. When I do go, I can’t remember the last time I ever used a public locker. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used one of those in my life. I don’t tend to carry much stuff with me, so a locker isn’t something I generally need.
