Main Character of the Week is a weekly column that tells you the most prominent “main character” online (good or bad). It runs on Fridays in the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter. If you want to get this column a day before we publish it, subscribe to web_crawlr, where you’ll get the daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.
The internet is a stage, and someone unwillingly stumbles onto it weekly. This makes them the “main character” online. Sometimes their story is heartwarming, like the Gen Alpha mewers; usually it’s a gaffe. In any case, that main character energy flows through the news cycle and turbo-charges debate for several business days.
Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week.
It’s the woman who refuses to return her shopping cart in the parking lot.
A new lesson in how to use the internet came to us recently via a lede from longtime Daily Dot contributing reporter Brooke Sjoberg, who wrote: “In the sphere of social media, even the most innocuous statements can quickly draw the ire of a large group of people.”
@drlesliedobson, a psychologist and TikTok creator, did just that when she said that she doesn’t return shopping carts because she doesn’t want to leave her children alone. This began an online firestorm of outraged viewers who couldn’t accept this and found it to be a selfish gesture.
“I’m not returning my shopping cart and you can judge me all you want,” she said. “I’m not getting my groceries into my car, getting my children into the car, and then leaving them in the car to go return the cart. So if you’re going to give me a dirty look, [expletive] off.”
In a vacuum, an understandable decision was made on behalf of her flock. But did you know that there is such a thing as the shopping cart theory? And that this woman failed the theory’s test because it asserts that returning shopping carts to either the storefront or at least those in-lot containers for shopping carts is an act of honor and failing to do so reveals a selfish person?
The week was hurried, and there are some other main characters we should mention, too: Vice President Kamala Harris, the nail customer who was laughed at and sparked a referendum on the very idea of visiting these salons, the landlord who rented out fans to his tenants amid a heatwave, the Ninja air fryer, Dua Lipa at Glastonbury.
As for Shopping Cart Lady, I would love to put my thumb on the scale here and take a passionate position but clearly, it’s OK to put your children first.
I think that’s the point of the shopping cart theory: There will always be mothers with toddlers and any number of circumstantial reasons not to return the cart, and so it is up to the rest of us!
I don’t leave the H-E-B parking lot every other week without returning at least 5 shopping carts per outing to account for the single mother or injured Iraq veteran who wasn’t able to participate.
And this holiday week, I encourage my fellow patriots to join in with me.
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Ramon Ramirez is the managing editor, and formerly the Dot’s news director, entertainment editor, and evening editor. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Grantland, Washington City Paper, Austin American-Statesman, and Austin Monitor.
