There is a version of this whole thing that starts with a shopping cart.
You are in a parking lot. You have unloaded your groceries. The cart corral is maybe forty feet away. Nobody is watching. There is no law, no camera, no consequence of any kind.
So: do you walk it back, or do you leave it wedged against the curb?
That is it. That is the whole test.
Nobody is grading this
The thing we like about the cart is that there is genuinely nothing in it for you. You do not get points. Nobody thanks you. The only person who ever finds out is the guy who has to come out in the rain later and round them all up, and he does not know it was you.
Which is exactly why it counts.
Being decent when somebody is watching is just manners. Being decent when nobody is watching is who you actually are. The cart is a forty foot walk that tells you the truth about yourself, for free, every single time you buy groceries.
It is not really about carts
Hold the door. Put the fitting room mess back on the hanger. Let the person with four items go ahead of your ninety. Text back. Bring the trash cans up for the neighbor who has been having a rough month.
None of these are hard. That is sort of the point!!
We did not build a brand around being a hero. Heroes are rare and most of us never get the chance. We built it around the small stuff, because the small stuff is available to everybody, roughly nine times a day, forever.
Okay, one honest confession
We have absolutely left a cart before.
Raining sideways, kid melting down in the back seat, arms full. We looked at that corral and we made a choice and it was the wrong one.
That is fine too. The goal was never to be perfect at this. The goal is to notice, and to do better next time, and to not get smug about it either way.
Put your cart back. Nobody is watching.
Do it anyway. 🖤
