My next instalment of the Sociology of Trolleys: There are many studies on why *online* shopping trolleys are abandoned (poor website design; lack of incentive or commitment by customers; and so on), there is little attention given to the reasons why people abandon shopping trolleys in everyday life.
Researcher Franck Cochoy has done some research on how shopping trolleys shape shopping behaviour (for example, by visually representing the volume of our spending by virtue of how full our trolleys are). But this research does not examine abandoned carts.
Many people think that trolleys are abandoned because kids are using them to push each other around. As such wayward trolleys are often seen as an act of social deviance by young people. In my forthcoming posts I’ll look at how abandoned carts are policed both informally at the community level and more formally through rewards and penalties (it’s actually a lucrative business). The truth about shopping trolley “deviance” is less about youth and more about social class.
The Other Sociologist 