Rescued: 10 Carts, Utah, United States

Because of some recent schedule changes, my cart-collecting expeditions are now happening just a little earlier in the morning. I've found that the people driving through the shopping center don't like to wait for pedestrians, let alone pedestrians pushing a train of shopping carts across the street, so I try to get my work done before too many people take to the roads. And the seasons are beginning to change, which makes the sun rise later. Part of this 90-minute cart session was in the dark.

It started simply enough. I found one of the local grocer's smaller carts sitting near a dumpster. It had been on the lawn the day before, so this was a bit of an improvement.

When I got to the main entrance to the apartment complex, I found two more of the little carts and a Wal-Mart cart at the head of this parking space. I also found two empty boxes (one for frozen food and one for cereal) hung on the tree as some kind of decorative tribute to laziness and apathy. But it's the next picture that showcases what I (voluntarily) had to deal with.

Yeah. That's not a hallucination. I don't have PhotoShop. That's real. That's nearly 30 shopping carts, all crowded around and behind the dumpster, and all approximately half a mile from their home stores.

Let me show this atrocity again from another angle. It's a whole line of carts of mixed origin, all unceremoniously smashed together and nearly all holding some piece of trash. The garbage collectors could not get the forks of their truck into the sides of the dumpster to lift and empty it. The dumpster doesn't fit in its little alcove either because of all the carts, which means that drivers have to dodge it and that trash is more likely to spill into the roadway.

I was appalled. I collected as many of these as I could. Because of an appointment this morning, I couldn't do as much as I wanted, but I did get a total of ten carts returned all the way to Wal-Mart.

The ten carts included this one, hiding in the bushes on the side of the road.