After seeing this discussion being brought up again, I was going to genuinely ask you all to explain where that comes from. I’m from Brazil and I don’t recall ever shopping at a place with a large parking lot, which I believe might be part of the issue. I was thinking how come people value this act so much and before starting to write a post here I sent a message to a friend, then it hit me: it’s absurd.
I mean it. The feeling I had reading the comments wasn’t confusion or ignorance, it was the cognitive dissonance of looking at the world I live in and what people decided marks a person as decent. This is one of the moments I really have to stop and check if I’m not actually the crazy one. I really can’t think of something smaller to care about that someone else will defend so vehemently. Really, try me, I’m already broken again.
In Spain, most stores with a parking lot use the same system. Many people carry a plastic “coin sized token” to avoid the problem of random people “stealing” your cart with the coin in it… but usually they still return the cart to get their token back.
The token is probably more expensive than the coin itself in this economy 😂
Well, it depends. They let you use any coin of 0.50€, 1€ or 2€… Temu has 8-packs of metal tokens for 3€, AliExpress has 10-packs for 1€, but many businesses have seized the opportunity to gift branded plastic or metal tokens, including some car dealerships… even the shops themselves! At this point, I have more tokens than I’ll ever have a chance to use 😁