The Home Depot Cart Arbitrage, or: When Optimization Goes Sideways

One might, upon first blush, imagine a retail environment to be a relatively straightforward system of inputs and outputs. Employees perform tasks; customers receive goods; carts are returned to their designated corrals. This pleasant equilibrium, however, is often a mirage, particularly when a well-meaning (or perhaps merely ambitious) Assistant Store Manager decides it’s time to “optimize” a lot associate’s labor.

Our protagonist, a Home Depot lot associate, had a clearly delineated role: collect carts and assist customers with heavy loading. A dual mandate, certainly, but one that presumably allowed for a flexible allocation of effort. Then came the ASM’s edict: more carts, more loading, no additional headcount. This, in classical economics, is what we call a “budget constraint violation” – demanding increased output without increasing available resources (or, crucially, the compensation for said resources). The naive micro-model suggests that if you simply ask for ‘more,’ you get ‘more.’ But as any former lawyer will tell you, the devil is in the implied terms of the contract.

The critical variable here, often overlooked by those who haven’t spent their prime years wrangling shopping conveyances, is the “Customer Cart Return Elasticity.” Or, as one commenter put it, “Imagine living in a country where people don’t return their carts themselves.” Indeed. Absent a robust customer incentive structure (i.e., a quarter deposit, or perhaps a public shaming gong), carts tend to migrate across the asphalt like a nomadic herd. When our associate was tasked with simultaneous, non-fungible duties—loading a customer’s lumber, which is an immediate and visible demand, versus collecting carts, which is a diffuse, long-term, and largely unobserved problem until it becomes catastrophic—the choice was, from a personal utility perspective, quite clear. The lumber gets loaded. The carts… well, the carts become a problem for Future Home Depot.

This isn’t malicious compliance in the sense of a deliberate, spiteful act. It’s more akin to a “Dynamic Resource Reallocation Under Duress.” When forced to choose between two impossible tasks, a rational agent (especially one paid minimum wage, as per the astute observation by Honest-Pepper8229) will prioritize the task that generates the least immediate managerial blowback and/or the most direct customer satisfaction. The ASM’s directive created a system where the associate was incentivized to not collect carts until the problem became undeniable, thus demonstrating the impossibility of the original ask. One could ask, as juraji_7 did, “Did you inform them that it was too much for one person, clarify priorities, or ask for help?” And the answer, often unspoken, is that sometimes the most effective clarification of priorities is a lot full of runaway shopping trolleys.

So, what we have here is a small, perfect case study in the limits of top-down optimization. The ASM sought to extract more labor value, but by failing to account for human agency, finite resources, and the unwritten social contracts of retail, they merely managed to shift the problem’s visibility. The ultimate outcome was not enhanced efficiency, but a temporary cessation of a critical service, demonstrating that sometimes, the most elegant solution to an impossible demand is to let the system break in the most illustrative way possible. Seems efficient, in a ‘for certain values of efficient’ way.