I had an ALDI shopping cart moment today.

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This one lady was trying without success, to force the link from the two shopping carts that are actually locked and are only supposed to be unlocked by inserting a solid Quarter in the slot, but this lady was dong it all wrong. She had no Quarter and for this reason she persisted to try to force the back end key into that slot. Along came a Hispanic dude, who showed her a fancy trick. He used his finger nail or some other thing, maybe a car key and inserted it without difficulty and released the two carts from the keyed link. He was so proud of his achievement at doing this that he performed the same method on the next lady to give her a cart. They went proudly into the Aldi mart figuring they beat the system. And I was watching the whole time and along came a lady with a quarter. She tried to put it in the slot but it fell out of her hand and then after picking it back up, she tried to place that Quarter into the slot to release that cart. But something was not right. She just could not make that Quarter work! Forcing these carts to unlock without using the Quarter can and often does do damage to the mechanism of the lock and the customers who are honest and use the Quarter system to gain access to a shopping cart at Aldi, sometimes are met with frustration as some of the locks are damaged and won't work. The question I have to ask is ... Is it okay for those who don't use the Quarter method, to force open these locks or use other things like car keys, finger nails or bobby pins while the rest of us go about it the right way, using a Quarter? The end result is that these carts that get broken locks on them from forceful entry by the bad customers will cost Aldi money to fix. Should they remove these locks so the honest customer will return the carts? Remember, the only reason they put those Quarter locking mechanisms on those carts is because people seldom bring them back after unloading. On the flip side, those who do return them don't always use a Quarter to do it. Then there are those who hand their cart to another customer with a Quarter still in the slot and don't ask them for it back. The other customer gets to use the other nice customer's quarter to either pay it forward or take that Quarter out after shopping and save it for when they want to pay a parking meter Downtown, in front of the municipal court house.