A shopping cart is not a wheel chair

I was sitting in my car at the parking lot by the grocery store, waiting for my windshields to defrost.

A man in his forties came out of the grocery store, removed his groceries from his shopping cart, and put them in his car. He looked around, and decided not to walk the thirty feet or so to the place where customers are supposed to leave the empty shopping carts.

He was parked right next to a parking space marked "reserved" with the picture of a wheel chair. Casually, he pushed his shopping cart into that parking spot, leaving it in the middle of the spot, making it impossible to use by a car.

I will never understand this attitude. A shopping cart is not a wheel chair. The parking spot is reserved for the disabled, and for a good reason.

I cannot count the number of times I drove to the grocery store, and had to drive away without stopping because all the reserved spaces were either taken or blocked by shopping carts. Now, when they are taken, I am certainly not complaining: I am not the only person in this town who has trouble walking. But when it is blocked off by shopping carts, it hurts.

How can anyone be so inconsiderate and prevent me, and others like me, from getting my groceries simply because he is too lazy to walk and push his empty shopping cart out of the way? I wish I could still walk the way I used to. I enjoyed walking!

In my young years I used to hike about twenty kilometers in the Carpathian Mountains every Saturday, no matter what the weather was: hot, cold, dry, snowy.

Nowadays, I walk very slowly, with the help of a cane, and cannot walk too far. Not because of anything evil I did, but because my diabetes has damaged my right foot permanently.

If you can walk, please realize how lucky you are. Please, do walk the distance and do not use parking spaces reserved for the disabled as a convenient spot to drop off empty shopping carts. To you it may be convenient, to many others it may mean they will have no choice but to skip a meal, or at least be forced to drive away and come back another time.

There is another instance that is also extremely bothersome. I don't know if this applies to everyone who parks in handicapped spaces but it does apply to people in wheelchairs. There is a striped area next to most handicapped spaces. The purpose of this area is to give someone room to get themselves and their wheelchair out of the car. Yet, it seems that people think if they park their shopping carts in that area that it is okay because they are not blocking the space. Unfortunately this destroys every bit of functionality that the space has for someone like myself. I personally don't use the spaces because of how close they are to the front door. I use them so I have room to get my wheelchair out of the car. I realize this doesn't apply to all cases this is just something I refer to as handicapped courtesy.