[rockfishroll]

I think this solution also misses the fact that certain kinds of people (like bored kids) will walk through fire for a free quarter. It's not even the money, it's the novelty. So if you have a population of people who consider the charge 'the cost of shopping' and don't care enough about 25 cents to return the cart, you still have a whole other population of people who will hunt them down and return them for those people.

As a kid, I almost missed a flight while hunting luggage carts at the airport.

[pavel_lishin]

In the local Aldi, it's not bored kids - it's usually unhoused folks who don't particularly have any other way of making money. Pushing carts around the small Aldi parking lot isn't a great way to make a living, but it presumably beats shaking a coffee cup in the middle of an intersection or walking around the entire town collecting plastic bottles or aluminum cans.

I'm sure they don't make much, but it's more than zero.

[c22]

Definitely beats sucking coins out of the subway turnstile:

https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/subway-token-suckin...

(Alternate link: https://archive.is/dyeND)

* I think I remember reading about this on hn but I can't find the thread, sorry.

[EvanAnderson]

> I think this solution also misses the fact that certain kinds of people (like bored kids) will walk through fire for a free quarter.

This. Soda bottle deposits when I was a kid.

(Heck, even now. Who am I kidding? My state doesn't have them anymore, but I still vacation in places that do, and I still keep an eye out for bottles and cans.)

[bookofjoe]

Finding discarded Coke bottles and returning them for the 2-cent deposit in 1959 in Milwaukee in the stockyards was my sole source of income. On a good day I could make 25-50 cents. That was real money! Hershey bars cost 5 cents.