Making the world a better place one quarter at a time: How ALDI is changing the world for the better.

By: Elizabeth Redhead Kriston

Times are tough. Mass shootings are happening more than daily. We had 4 shootings in the last 24 hours. I believe the latest statistic shows more 253 mass shootings in the last 216 days.

I am scared.

I want to cry.

I want to scream

With these incidences, we cannot deny that we are living in a divisive and violent world. We are polarized by politics, racism, sexism, poverty,  wealth, climate change and many other factors.

I can’t help but feel that we are meaner, more judgmental and more isolated than ever before. We cannot agree to disagree. Instead, we launch anonymous insults over social media. We unfriend and unfollow each other. We say hateful things with no regard to who we might be offending. We no longer talk and listen. We make snap judgements based on sound bites and other people’s opinions. We refuse to meet in the middle. We wave and wear symbols of hate

We do virtually nothing to make the change we need.

Before the world got so complicated, I allowed the little things in day to day life make me angry. I would rail against the small injustices like line cutters or mispriced merchandise. These minor infractions got my ire up sometimes to boiling. It’s funny how just making it out of a store without being shot is the current goal. Coupons and grabbing the last bargain off the shelf no longer matter.

Before gun violence distracted my shopping adventures, one of my biggest annoyances at the grocery store revolved around shopping carts. I would pull into a parking spot only to discover that some thoughtless patron had left his or her cart smack dab in the middle of the diagonal lines marking the deceptively available spot.

This left me with some hard choices. A) I could put the car in park, get out and move the cart. B) I could use my car to nudge the cart out of the way. C) I could relocate hoping to find another truly free spot.

This never failed to put me in a foul mood before I even exited my vehicle. No doubt I would take my frustrations out on the other customers or staff (though never with a gun). I would be impatient as I pushed past carts stopped a bit too far in the aisle. I’d groan as that indecisive lady hemmed and hawed about which jarred sauce she wanted. I would stand seething as I waited for my turn making the same decision which, of course, I would make much more quickly. Next thing I know I’m rudely reaching in front of her offering a curt and insincere, “excuse me” or “sorry.”

Equally annoying, after finding a truly free spot and walking the half mile to the store, I would enter through the automatic glass doors to be greeted by the cavernous area that was supposed to house the carts for the shoppers. The echo of my sigh and grunts of frustration would fall on deaf ears as the staff was busy stocking shelves with merchandise I had nowhere to store. They were oblivious to the lack of ready carts for the customers.

A simple look out of the plate glass window revealed a parking lot over flowing with carts. Carts in corals. Carts in parking spots. Carts abandoned on the small dirt islands that helped to divide the parking are into neat rows. Carts everywhere but inside the store entrance where I needed one.

My aggravation, once again, would translate into anger as I stormed out into the lot to push a rattling metal cart over the rough and uneven pavement. The loud vibrations finally abated once we reached the smooth linoleum of the store.  Safely inside, the front wheel revealed an annoying squeak previously masked by the thunders trip inside and of course,  a slight tug to the left.

ALDI grocery stores, with a stroke of simple genius, solved all of these problems, well most of them, by simply tethering each cart to the one in front with a device that requires a quarter to free a cart to be used in the store. The quarter is easily retrieved once shopping is completed, the groceries are safely stored in the car parked in the spot you pulled into the first time without incident and the empty cart glides back across the seemingly glassy smooth terrain of the ALDI parking lots.

With this simplistic system no carts are left abandoned in strange and inconvenient places. Plenty of carts wait in the coral (at least on the off-peak hours I shop) ready for the customer to slide in the quarter before slipping easily into the store. Freed from the frustrations and annoyances of traditional grocery store cart usage, customers’ grasps their carts and shop with kind and joyful hearts.

Shoppers, overflowing with patience, gladly wait for that weird, indecisive lady to smell each melon oblivious to dozens of others stacking up behind her as her cart blocks the entire aisle.

The staff smiles and practically sings as they checkout customers and stock shelves knowing they do not have to tramp out of doors in all types of inclement weather to wrangle carts left willy-nilly in the lot. Customers’ kindness rains down on them making them smile and even like their job. They volunteer to get that item you overlooked bringing an array of flavors or styles to let you choose never asking the customer to reshelve it.  

A simple quarter, twenty-five little pennies, have made the world a better place. A quarter is just enough money to motivate people to want the refund and return the cart but not so much as to discourage shoppers from spending lots of money.

Even better, a generous spirit overtakes some folks. These new philanthropists offer up their carts to new arrivals waving away the quarter proffered to pay them back. This simple act of kindness inspires a chain reaction of paying it forward as that one cart gets handed off free of charge all day long.

People help each other out by commandeering recently unloaded carts right at the trunk of their fellow shopper’s car saving them from pushing it back to the coral. An act rarely witnessed in traditional grocery store parking lots.

The good mood of the customers often translates to other small gestures such as helping a less abled body person wrangle that impulsively purchased bookshelf into their too small car.

The addition of a quarter to release a cart into the customers care is genius.

Twenty-five cents might just be all we need to make our country unite and find compassion for each other. The white supremacists hands the cart to the Mexican-American. The misogynistic boss hands off a cart to the administrative assistant who suffers with low pay and daily harassment. The climate change denier helps the woman with cloth bags unload her cart of the organic, ethically sourced foods she purchased so he can push it back into the store to load up with his processed foods.

The mighty quarter may just lead the way to making us kinder, safer and happier.

Just in case that doesn’t work stop what you are doing and write or call your congressional representatives and demand change so we can shop without getting shot.

Links for contacts can be found here:  https://www.conginst.org/contact-congress/