I was heading into the grocery store, and as per usual (except if the carts are wet/snowy/absent) I took a cart in with me from the parking lot—and this time I’d noticed a cart someone had left actually IN a parking space, so I took that one. This gave me a very pleasant hit of self-satisfaction and, as I was enjoying that chemical, I thought that what’s missing from such tasks in general is CREDIT. What I said I like about my FitBit is that I feel like someone is watching approvingly; if there is no deity in your life to take that job, it can be very satisfying to find a substitute.
For life arenas such as shopping carts, what we need are Good Citizen Points. One point for taking a cart in with you from the parking lot, which means your net effect on the cart situation is zero: you didn’t add a cart an employee would have to come outside to collect. You’d achieve the same effect by taking a cart from inside and then returning it inside (instead of to the corral), so you’d get one point for that as well. One additional point for taking in a cart that was loose in the parking lot causing trouble. One more point if that involved going out of your way to fetch it. But maybe take off half a point if you knew people were seeing you be so righteous.
One point for letting someone merge at a tricky intersection. One point for picking up a piece of trash. One point for holding a door. Additional points for any activity that causes you additional inconvenience or discomfort: an extra point for trash that is damper or dirtier or farther away; an extra point for holding the door when it’s freezing out; an extra point for letting someone merge when you’re in a hurry.
Likewise, points can be lost. There are a very few people who have legitimate reasons not to return shopping carts to a parking lot corral; everyone else loses a point. (Parking lots without corrals are a different category.) Leaving the cart in the middle of a good parking space loses an additional point. (People who literally can’t return the cart can gain a point by putting the cart where it doesn’t block a parking space and is at least partially prevented from getting blown into someone else’s car.) Dropping a piece of trash accidentally and not picking it up loses a point. (I am not even addressing deliberate littering. What would be next: figuring out how many Good Citizen Points someone loses for robbing the store?)
You lose a point for pretending not to see someone who wants to merge. Lose a point per minute of tailgating. Lose a point for sighing audibly in a long line.
Ideally these points would be automatically tallied by a supernatural being. Lacking that, maybe those little click-counter things, if those can subtract as well as add? You’d press the button every time you’d earned/lost a point, and at the end of the day you could look at your total. A device similar to the FitBit would upload your points to a computer or phone so you could see your progress over time.
It will be tempting, I know, to start Overdoing the points. I noticed this with attempted additions to the Holiday Card Scoring System: we start out with plus-one point here and minus-one point there, and before you know it’s it’s “What about X? MINUS FIFTY POINTS, right??” No. This throws off the scale. If a behavior generates or subtracts more than a point or two or three, we are leaving the jurisdiction of Good Citizen Points. Perhaps a very few activities might qualify, but only a very few.
It will also be tempting to use points to grade other people’s behavior rather than one’s own. One point lost for each incidence.
Love it!!
I mean, I suppose robbing the store might be worth negative fifty points.
As someone with small children, I always take a cart in because I usually have at least 2/4 in the cart (LOVE stores that have the huge carts for extra kids, BTW, but get so irritated when I see a family with just 1-2 kids taking the last one. Maybe a negative point for that?). But I would argue that taking in all the carts so an employee doesn’t have to would lead to more of an employer-deciding-they-no-longer-need-to-fill-that-position kind of situation. So maybe leave a few extra carts for job security?
I don’t know why I’m so fixated on the cart thing, but I will park farther away from the store just so long as I can find a spot *directly next to* a cart corral. And I get annoyed when the employees are too efficient and there are no longer carts in the parking lot such that I have to juggle baby carriers and hand-holding toddlers just to get in the store.
I know a lot of supermarkets hire intellectually disabled people as cart collectors, which I think is really fantastic. So maybe a point for putting a stray cart in the corral instead?
So are you working with an app developer? ;) this is totally an app waiting to exist. Our phones are the little clickers and gold stars made only of electrons will be distributed weekly.
I know we’re trying not to go overboard with the point system, but I need to suggest a point for the thank you wave while driving. No one does it anymore, and when it happens I feel like flagging the person down and thanking THEM for thanking me.
That’s a great one! And a point too for a pedestrian who waves a thanks.
Yes–the thank you wave!!!! I personally award a lot of points for those. I also hand out mental demerits for not giving one.
I think I do this in my brain :)
Me, too, Amanda. I think we all kind of do this, and on the occasion when we are forced by necessity, or when we are just in one of those “whatever” moods, we say to ourselves that we do the good citizen thing 99% of the time, but today we just cannot [put the cart back and make the dental appointment, or whatever].
I also do this in a Bad Citizen way. I am in a quilting group that meets at a church for 2 hours, one day a week. All the parking spaces for 3 blocks around have a 1.5 hour limit. I’m not stopping my quilting, loping down to the next block, and inserting money for the additional half hour. So when I do get a ticket, I just kind of average it in with all the days I did NOT get a ticket–okay this is a $25 fine, but I parked here 7 Tuesdays for 2 hours without a ticket, so that’s really only about $3 a week.[ I know, this is pure rationalization.]
Perhaps if you got a fitbit you’d see the trip to feed the meter as a way to get more steps. :)
An extra point if you retrieve a cart from a handicapped space? Extra negative if you leave it there? Also how about this–I was at the grocery store yesterday and I was wheeling my big cart towards the exit when a woman pushed a tiny cart into the aisle and then WALKED OFF with her bags. So yes, she pushed a cart into the exit aisle and then LEFT IT!. I wheeled it back to the entrance–but I huffed and muttered loud enough one of her children turned to look at me, so I don’t expect points for that.
It often freaks me out when your posts come right from my head, but this is unreal. I have a points calculator going in my head ALL THE TIME.
my husband actually argues in FAVOR of leaving carts in the parking lot–he loses a lot of points right? but his point is quasi valid-don’t tell him I said so–the Kroger near us doesn’t have bagger/carryout service so the only job for kids is cart wrangler and then they move on up to things like sweeper and product returns to the shelf–so he argues the more people leave their carts out the more kids will have jobs–I usually only find validity in his point when the north wind is blowing 70 miles an hour and the silt from the river is sandblasting my glasses and blowing bags of groceries away then I think hmmm he has a good point and drop my cart next to my truck and bolt
Right, and the store robbers keep the police employed! I’m with you, not your DH!
This exact scenario is one of the things I love most about the Harry potter movies- someone sees you and says 5 points for gryffindor! And suddenly rubies are zooming into your hourglass to keep magical score. I love it.
I would totally buy an app/device/whatever that would tally points like this. I love this idea!
I love this – also, letting someone go ahead of you in line, one point.
I think your daily and weekly totals should have more focus than your running total, otherwise after having an extremely bad day where you lost a bunch of points, it could be so disheartening that you’d get an “oh, who even cares, it’s not worth trying” effect that could bring you down for days or weeks, instead of feeling empowered to look at other recent good days individually for motivation to keep doing well. Did that make sense? Like, everyone has a super crap day occasionally, and I wouldn’t want that to count against you too much. Or the opposite, I wouldn’t want to, like, give myself permission to be lax just because I’d racked up a big positive balance lately, if I was only looking at my overall total. Cuz we want the incentive to be not just maintaining a positive balance, or even only increasing your total over time; rather, the better goal would be to continuously improve your positive points AND decrease your negative points, but not to think you could somehow spend positive points like Karma.
So maybe your counter *could* remember your overall forever total, but what it would actually show you most prominently would be a running total from the past week or month.
It would then also be awesome to compare monthly totals over time, and year over year, etc so you could see larger trends about yourself: you’re nicer in your birthday month, or summer months, or whatever. Oh! Plus! Not just the total, but the count of incidences would be interesting! Like maybe in January you only average five plus points and three minus points per day, but then in June you’re averaging ten plus points and eight minuses! So your net per day is still plus two, but you had more point-changing encounters!
PS: Can you tell I’m a data analyst?
Create this app and I’d buy it!
I did something really nice for a stranger the other day, but as I was awarding myself a round of bonus points, I wondered if I then needed to subtract a point or two for the extreme glow of self-satisfaction I had after the fact.
What do you think? Should there be a small tax for awarding OURSELVES points? It’s a conundrum, because as you point out, it’s not like a Supreme Deity is going to swoop down do it.
Anyway, welcome to my world. :)
I just had twins and I would award many points to all of the amazing people who offer a hand, open a door, don’t grimace when they see our big stroller coming. Complementing a tired, frumpy, unshowered mamma gets points. Holding me hostage in the dairy section to tell me about a friend of a friend’s twin grandchildren deducts a point. That makes me sound snarky but I need to get in and out while the babies are sleeping!
I wish we could see everyone else’s current Point Total. That way, if someone cuts me off in traffic, but I see they have a positive point total, I would give them the benefit of the doubt and pretend it was accidental. But if I saw they had a negative point total, I could safely assume they’re an intentional jerk and flip them off without feeling bad (even though I earn negative points as a result).
THIS WOULD BE SO AWESOME
ONE MILLION POINTS TO SWISTLE FOR THE IDEA.
Oh Swistle. You have the BEST ideas.
Can we please all agree to deduct points for people who let you hold the door open for them and do not say thanks? And if they have children with them, they are teaching their children a bad lesson, so they should have extra points deducted based on the number of children. Maybe i should have to deduct points for being bitter about holding the door open for people who don’t appreciate it. I like the idea of seeing other people’s point totals so you know if they are generally a nice person or a not-nice person. Although that would mean all old people would seem really nice simply because they have lived longer and have more points. Maybe a point per age ratio would help? Swistle. you are a GENIUS.
I would really like to know what the cart exceptions are :). In the summer, when I’ve unloaded my bags and strapped my two kids in the car, and one of them is screaming bloody murder while the other is already breaking out in a sweat, I get anxiety about walking the 50 feet to the cart corral, like maybe I’ll get struck by a car and no one will realize my kids are inside MY car, and then they will die in the heat while the ambulance is tending to me. Or if I leave the windows rolled down, maybe a carjacker will come and take my car with the kids in it while my back is turned returning the cart to the corral. Usually I suck it up and make a dash for the corral, but once or twice I have lost points and parked the cart over a grass island, or something, because juggling the logistics of the Target parking lot is apparently where my mental faculties break down.
Hi Swistle! I’m blaming Google Reader (and a broken compy, plus extreme forgetfulness) for my lengthy absence. : ) ANYWAY, I wanted to throw in that this sounds like what St. Therese of Lisieux did! She kept a beaded bracelet (…not a smartphone) in her pocket, and whenever she performed a sacrifice (for her, obviously, it was a means of pleasing God – she said it was like giving Him a flower, I think), she’d slide a bead from one side to the other. (Or something like that.) The point (get it??) was that it made her think more intentionally about cheerfully accepting trials on behalf of Christ, and turning the little irritations she experienced into a means of spiritual growth. And she’s a Doctor of the Church. So. There you go. You’re practically a saint.
I award myself gold stars all the time. Or smack my hand mentally, depending. I like the gold bead idea. Or an app!