I got to thinking more about the abandoned shopping cart phenomenon.
In contrast to shopping carts standing idle, I’ve noticed that there aren’t a great deal of curb finds out here—D and I scored a file cabinet and some frames curbside when someone moved out down the block from us, but the average garbage day is not the delirious dumpster diving dream that it is in New York—people just don’t leave stuff on the curb that often. Instead, this is a major thrift store town: there are 60 Goodwill stores between LA and Riverside counties alone, not to mention the numerous Out-of-the-Closet, National Council of Jewish Women-LA, and other various independent thrift stores dotting the landscape.
So, what gives? Why the explosion of thrift stores and the utter desolation of the sidewalk marketplace, with no goods curbside and shopping carts left idle for weeks?
I puzzled over how a city comes to be a thrift store town versus a curbside town for an embarrassingly long time before it hit me: cars, stupid.
People are not, by and large, on the sidewalks noticing abandoned shopping carts, and those few that are on sidewalks never have to worry about there being enough shopping carts to go around. So why bother hording a shopping cart? And, indeed, why leave a few things on the curb when your car has enabled the accumulation of so much unwieldy stuff that you could get a serious tax break if you drove—once more, in your car—down to the local goodwill instead? (Never mind the fact that there’s probably at least three in walking distance; you’ve clearly got too much to carry, let’s be honest.)
So what do these seemingly unrelated photos have in common? It doesn’t seem like such a stretch to trace the contemporary abandoned shopping cart phenomenon all the way back to the sweeping freeway visions of Robert Moses that turned LA into a city built for cars instead of people, and back further to the oil prospecting frenzy that made cars and freeways a possibility, and farther still to the mentality that sent whole families trekking out west in search, moving, moving, moving towards something better, something different, something disconnected from the ties of the past.
I think it’s pretty wild that ideas become spaces become patterns that shape behavior and create ‘normal.’ Pioneer begets abandoned shopping cart; fascinating.
