Seems early posters are blaming the customers, but at least in Canada the grocery stores treat their customers with so much disdain that i see no problem with people leaving their cart wherever, if it can make more trouble for loblaws et al. Framing helping out a hostile oligopoly as “doing the right thing” is nonsense.
For the record I generally bring back my cart, but I’d stand behind someone who wanted to hurl it into the middle of the lot, at least at one of the grocery oligarchs.
If you want to cause trouble for Loblaws, don't shop at Loblaws and other chains of theirs. Willingly giving them your money, and then performatively "retaliating" by making the life of the minimum-wage employee (who would be here either way) slightly harder is completely useless as a form of protest. This feels like a rationalization for not taking the cart back by trying to hand-wave it to some large systematic actors. But the whole point is that the shopping cart choice is always a hyper-local choice. It's only about you, other customers and the people working at the store, not some distant megacorporation.
I'm returning my cart not because of my support of grocery stores but because I care about other customers: abandoned carts getting in the way of walking/parking, may damage cars and just in general clutter the space
For the record I generally bring back my cart, but I’d stand behind someone who wanted to hurl it into the middle of the lot, at least at one of the grocery oligarchs.