We live in difficult economic times. Soaring gas prices, troubled financial institutions, and spiraling unemployment are creating a devastating impact on our economy. But there another, far more insidious power at work here as well: the do-gooder.

This was driven home to me today when, after loading my groceries into my friend’s car, I placed our shopping cart in an out-of-the-way location for the cart gatherer to pick up. My friend made an exasperated face and trundled the cart across the parking lot to where a lonely, mostly unused cart corral sat.

“Now, Nate,” you might say.” “She was just being nice by taking the cart to the corral.” And on the surface, I might be tempted to agree with you. “And Nate,” you might continue. “There are signs all over the parking lot that say you should clean up your cart.” Again, a valid point.

But consider this: Wal-Mart, being the corporate megalith that it is, has perfected the art of überspecialization. They have thousands of employees with a very specific job function, and that job function is cleaning up the carts in Wal-Mart parking lots. Now let’s imagine that everybody decided to pay attention to those signs that Wal-Mart places in the parking lot and starts putting their carts away. All of a sudden, there’s no work for the parking lot cart attendents. Wal-Mart, always looking to pad their bottom line, decides that they can afford to fire those parking lot cart attendents to save a few bucks, and they then get the old people greeters to go out to the corral every couple of hours to pick up the neatly-stacked carts.

So really, by putting those carts away, you’ve deprived someone of a job, and furthermore, you’ve forced an elderly person to do a job that they’re probably not equipped for (if you car about such things). So do the economy a favor. Leave your carts in the parking lot.