There is a big shopping mall near where I live which has a Woolworths, Coles, Aldi, Big W, and a Target, as well as a Tong-Li supermarket and it is also in close proximity to a K-Mart. During the worst of the pandemic when we were in a very very tight lockdown and the only acceptable excuse to leave the house was either for exercise or to go to the supermarket or a pharmacy, these places inside the shopping mall were the only bright lights in an otherwise darkened place. The lockdown also meant that the car parks were shockingly empty and that the unheralded scourge plaguing our parking did not happen. Now that things are back to normal, we have yet again unchained that most horrible of problems: The Trolley Problem.
Ahah, the trolley problem - that hypothetical cliché involving a speeding thing, and the active choice of killing people in order to save others. It's a favourite problem for philosophy and ethics classes precisely because it is a hypothetical problem which has passed into cliché.
Let's hack the problem further. What if instead of a street car, it was a shopping trolley? What of instead of pulling a switch or pushing a very fat man in front of it, the choice that you had was to return the shopping trolley to the Trolley Return Bay, or leave them strewn willy-nilly all through the car park and in the bus station on the other side of the railway line. That's an experiment that we have performed again and again and we can come to the conclusion that if returning a trolley to the proper place requires even the smallest amount of effort, then lots of people will turn into lazy trashgoblins and just leave the trolley where ever they happen to be.
Leave them in the middle of the car park taking up space. Leave them in a disabled car park space; not only taking up space but actively making life harder for the people who already have life made difficult for them. Leave them in a lift. Leave them at the bus station. Leave them out on the street. The number of lazy trashgoblins who just leave the trolley where ever they happen to be, is a number much bigger than some and certainly a non-zero number.
You would think that there would be pressure from either store owners or shopping mall owners, who then have to carry a dead loss in collecting all of the shopping trolleys that have escaped into the wild for a five mile radius around (leave the shopping trolleys in a canal, if you are a nasty, bored and lazy teenager trashgoblin), that there would be at least one util of effort in trying to standardise shopping trolleys so that they'd at least pack together nicely, right? Wrong!
Woolworths has trolleys that are wider than Coles and so the Woolworths and Coles trolleys will only pack together one way. Aldi has a different basket size which sits lower and deeper than either Woolworths and Coles; so its trolleys refuse to pack nicely with anyone else's. You'd think that Woolworths and Big W which are owned by the same company would have the same trolleys but again, no,
Big W's trolleys are made of plastic and just like Aldi's also refuse to pack nicely with anyone else's. Target has a more different and different coloured plastic trolley which also refues to pack nicely with anyone else's. Tong-Li has a fun size trolley which presumably means that they expect that their customers don't buy very many bulky things and so just like everyone else, it doesn't pack nicely either. K-Mart which isn't even in the shopping mall proper but a stand alone complex on the other side of the street, has its own trolleys with a lower shelf.
When you have by my count seven different shopping trolleys, all of which mostly refuse to pack together. They collectively make an absolute mockery of the trolley return bay. At another local shopping mall of which Woolworths is the only business with any trolleys, you will see trolley collectors wrangle an insane number of trolleys together with octopus straps; forming giant snakes of trolleys which might be as much as 50 feet long. There are legends in shopping trolley lore about the head of an occy strap coming off and it snapping back and slicing a trolley collector in half but the amount of evidence for that is exactly nil.
Why can't we come to some kind of Australian Standard for shopping trolleys, so that they all pack nicely? Does it really matter if a trolley is branded for a particular company? Does anyone out here in shopping land honestly care if their trolley happens to match the choreographed "shopping experience" that the shop wants to give you? Why can't we have some standard pool from which all the shops draw their shopping trolleys?
The stupid thing about this that actively led to the problem, was to do with competition where there shouldn't have been any. The market for shopping trolleys is admittedly small but there are a number of significant buyers in the market. There are also quite a number of sellers in the market and together this means that you have significant differentiation in product. The problem which stems from this is that differentiation in product is the worst possible outcome.
In the case of shopping trolleys, then end user doesn't ever buy the product and so they have no say at all in voting with their dollars about how that product should be shaped, even though without them, then raison d'être of the shopping trolley would cease to exist. The consumer (albeit a use who doesn't pay for the service in most cases) has to live with whatever trashgoblin choices are imposed upon them by management who very obviously doesn't care or concede that there is a problem - or else they'd have fixed it. We do not need seven different kinds of shopping trolley in the shopping mall and it could be argued that because supermarkets are generally the same across the country, that we do not need seven different kinds of shopping trolley across Australia either.
If this sounds like communism, then guess what? I don't care. The company CHEP with its blue pallets practically everywhere, almost through force of will was able to get pallet sizes conformed to its standards and by inference, forklift standards also conforming to its standards. Nobody out here in the real world, honestly gives anything more than a small huff about pallets. Why can't it be the same for shopping trolleys? If CHEP is a private company which almost single handedly set the standard for palletisation because of its market power, then from where I stand, fascism and communism look identical. What we're living with is some kind of anarcho-free market libertarianism. Why can't they be all the same?
Then we could pack all of the shopping trolleys together nicely in the shopping trolley bay. Then the lazy trashgoblins who just leave the trolley where ever they happen to be, wouldn't have an excuse any more. The people who already find life difficult, would have even more difficulty imposed on them by having as many trolleys just being left in disabled car park spaces.
No comments:
Post a Comment