Put it anywhere
I find it interesting that, in Southern California at least, it is okay to just leave your shopping carts in the middle of the parking lot.
Not only is this okay, it's actually ENCOURAGED by large, stand alone, retail establishments. How?
They put in one cart return location NEXT TO THE STORE ENTRANCE.
I'm 100% convinced they don't understand the concept of making life easy for customers. Look, customers actually don't want to actually WALK the forty yards to return the cart, so put the cart return spaces all over the parking lot for convenience. Do they think the loss of maybe 4 or 6 parking spots is going to adversely affect the bottom line? If anything having all the carts in six places around the parking lot will the time of that poor employee that has to spend 50% of his work day rounding up the carts from all over the parking lot.
And speaking of those parking spaces, I also find interesting the fact that, in the car-centric culture of Los Angeles, parking spaces are smaller around here than they are any place else. Maybe the reasoning goes there are more cars, so we have to fit more of them in to our parking lots, so let's make the spaces smaller since we'll have more of them? I don't know. I do know that even with my narrow car, I have to squeeze into parking spaces and squeeze out through my door to get out of my car and not hit the car next to me.
Maybe that's my problem. Maybe I should just open my car door into the cars next to me. Maybe that's just expected here.
I think I'll find a Jag to park next to next time. Or maybe that Lotus I saw.