Supermarkets that make you put in a quarter to take a shopping cart are really just paying the homeless $0.25 each to return them from the parking lot.
it's the same for bottle deposits in parts of Europe. anything in a plastic bottle costs an extra ~10c which you can retrieve by depositing the empty in a machine at the supermarket
in the UK, trolley deposits are much more expensive, at £1. people are more likely to retrieve a £1 than a quarter, but the atomic payout is ~5x higher, so I wonder which scenario yields better pay for the homeless
I mean ultimately the goal is to find a balance where carts won’t be everywhere and customers aren’t inconvenienced to the point of choosing a different store.
