The hell is up with people?  Ok, so in the stores that rent their carts for a quarter (like airport luggage carriers; not surprisingly, it gets people to actually put their carts back) people tend to just offer someone returning their cart a quarter to take it over – saving the returner the walk and saving them both time fiddling with the cart return area.  I asked the woman parked two cars down from me for hers, offering a quarter, and had the coin waived off.  By about the third repetition of ‘pay it forward’, however, I wasn’t feeling so much that that woman was trying to do a small kindness, as she was imposing some kind of a forced moral lesson on me; incidentally, that didn’t leave me feeling thankful so much as wanting to say ‘take my fucking quarter, already’, and be done with it.

(Conversely, when I handed it off to the next person, all I said was ‘don’t even worry about it; have a great day’, and I can almost guarantee he passed it along without having to be asked, and got a bonus smile out of the deal (whereas I’m still irritated about my encounter).  Just saying.)