City Lab
Abandoned shopping carts have long been roaming characters in urban spaces. With little reason for grocery stores to retrieve runaways, or for long-term borrowers to return them, it’s not unusual to find carts that have strayed far from their natural habitats. Now a lawmaker in the D.C. suburbs wants to pass a law requiring businesses to collect their shopping carts. As WAMU points out, that legislative effort coincides with the fact that February is “National Return Shopping Carts to the Supermarket” Month. Mark your calendars.
Back in 2006, artist Julian Montague compiled a book called The Stray Shopping Carts of North America: A Guide to Field Identification. The guide is written in the voice of a character who identifies shopping carts with the intensity of the most serious birder. For the 10th anniversary of the book in 2016, Montague told CityLab’s Mark Byrnes that while people might associate shopping carts with homelessness, their nomadic lives are no indicator of economic conditions:
“I’d go to a city, I’d look at a map and go, “Where’s the water near the shopping center?” It’s all the same everywhere. Rich areas, poor areas—people want to throw shopping carts in the water.”
Read their full interview: A Look Back at the Greatest (and Only) Stray Shopping Cart Identification Guide Ever Made
1 comment:
Part of it is it is much easier to bring them down the hill to the water than to move them up the hill and away from the water. They are disposable at the bottom of the hill, and in much of the world, the bottom of the hill means water.
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