Why is this practice promoted?

It's someone's job and they make their money grabbing those carts, aren't we taking that away from them if all is perfectly arranged and they can just collect the carts in 2 minutes? This concept seems to only benefit the business in saving labor?

Coincidentally, I was checking out two days ago at a Costco and the manager came up to my cashier and said, "close up after this one, I'm going to send you home early okay?" The cashier said, "yeah, I guess..." But you could tell they clearly didn't want to leave early. If there were a bunch of carts in the parking lot at that point, feels like that person might get an extra 30 mins or so on the clock... Why aren't we supporting that? Manager would say, " let's close you down after this one, and then please do a lap in the parking lot to grab carts before you go"

Us carefully putting the carts away as customers is just free labor that the corporation benefits from... Period. How does this help the worker making an hourly wage?

I always park strategically - not closest to the front door, but right next to a cart corral if possible.

This is triply important when you’re lugging kids around.

Always! And I have those super sized insulated grocery bags so I can usually carry everything with both hands once I'm done checking out. So I just return my cart back in at the door and macho walk out of the store. 😤

always and forever https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tKAVPLgPrI

someone has a job to collect them and unless the parking lot is even close to full there's no risk for any vehicles getting damaged from a few dozen loose carts.

Lol I put shopping cart inside the White lines of the parking spot not in the line like a responsible person

Is this some sort of american meme that I am too rich to understand?