Shopping Carts

So what does it mean to be "American?" There are so many ways to define "American", let alone the endless interpretations of what it means to be "American". But for the sake of my early morning revelation in the grocery store parking lot, I realized that you can learn a lot about being "American" just by looking around the parking lot at your local supermarket.
What do I mean by all this, you say? Well, aside from the fact that we "American's" do not need to worry about where we get our (luxurious) food products, being "American" means you can get those food products and then leave the shopping cart anywhere you'd like. At first, I began to reason that people are simply lazy (which I believe could be part of the problem), but then it hit me that really there is no need to return your shopping cart to the "return shopping carts here" sign in the parking lot because of two things:
1) Once you leave it wherever you did and you drive off, it is no longer your problem; and
2) Chances are the supermarket hires some (most likely) minimum wage worker to fetch all the stranded carts anyway.
How really really ridiculously "American" is that? Its disturbing to me because of how rampantly common it is for "American's" to leave their shopping carts wherever it is most convenient. Don't get me wrong, I am not claiming perfection in this area myself. I have at moments been guilty of leaving a cart or two stranded on the curb. However, I hope this is a lesson to us all that whether or not it is convenient to do so, lets try not to be so "American" and serve one another (not to mention the poor Safeway worker) by doing our part to be responsible to our neighbor.
To those of you who don't care about all that I just said, at least put those carts away for the sake of not denting/scratching cars!
And while I'm on the subject of responsibility to one another, let me say a word about paper towels in public restrooms. Geez people-- do you really need THAT much paper to wipe your hands? You're probably going to end up just wiping it on your pants anyway when you realize that the 10 feet of brown towel that you just grabbed (of which you only really used 2 sq feet max!) did not get the job done. Sorry, I've been holding that one in ever since I stopped blogging on my livejournal-- which was WELL before this whole "green" movement... it's just plain common sense.


FYI: I like to quote "Americans" because I really have no idea if this is only a problem in the US or not.