At first glance, it sounds like a frivolous issue to be considering while many are struggling with more pressing challenges, such as unemployment, the pandemic or trying to put food on the table.
I write for The Times’s Express desk, which is a team of editors and reporters whose primary job is to jump on breaking news, like shootings and extreme weather.
Shopping carts fit into that lane.
It was intriguing, but not enough to hang an entire story on.
She put me in touch with the state ombudsman, who put me in touch with a woman who uses a wheelchair and whose experiences showed unreturned shopping carts are more than a petty annoyance.
There were video archives of local government meetings about what to do with abandoned carts, and the reality YouTube series Cart Narcs, in which cart slackers are confronted on camera.
There were other stories to do on the Express desk, so shopping carts went to the back burner while I wrote about human smuggling, vaccines, court cases and a series of earthquakes.
There were works by Banksy, a filmmaker’s anecdote, the childhood memories of a Virginia board of supervisors official and Times archival stories about the inventor of the shopping cart.