Readit Newsedit, on reflection there are older summerian letters sent back and forth by traders in....cloth, who had a "shop" in one city/country but the main production was in mesoptsmia proper, and if memory serves the distant trader was a woman asking for more products to sell, and again other chit chat, but both instances required exceptional conditions and the use of very durable materials, papyrus paper and dried and protected clay
Note that papyrus is not a "very durable material"; it's an extremely fragile one.
Papyrus records survive in Egypt, and only in Egypt, because nothing ever spoils in Egypt no matter how fragile it might be.
Cuneiform records survive all over the cuneiform-using world because they are very durable if you set fire to them.
It is possible to nationalize a company, though. For example, Saudi Aramco is owned by the state.
How is that not common/collective control of the means of production?
Let? Like this 1? Where if you don't we threaten to fire the CEO and take over the company otherwise?
Are you sure it is let?
> local politicians
Is 1 or more individuals. In this instance it is "the government" as an entity. Not the same?
What does that even give you? They can argue all they want. Doesn't mean the government will listen.
Why do you think that is?
The ADA is not a good thing. It's best known recently for forcing UC Berkeley to take down the lectures they used to provide over the internet for free. But it's been having very negative effects since it was enacted.
Locally all supermarkets actually have locks at the entrace so that people can lock their shopping trolleys next to the cashiers.
Curbs have onramps. Pretty much every corner and every driveway provides a ramp where wheeled vehicles can easily get on to the sidewalk. You will never have any difficulty pushing a shopping cart onto a sidewalk.
https://sdotblog.seattle.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/202...
It's not an incentive to "not steal the trolley", it's an incentive to put it back in its place for people who were already not planning on stealing one.
This way the store and the customers don't have to deal with trolleys strewn around everywhere and blocking parking spaces, among other advantages.
I think when they removed the coins during Covid they just noticed that most people were already well-behaved enough to return the carts to their places, so the incentive is just not needed anymore. Actually in Belgium, Colruyt had never had coins for their carts and it just works.
There's no particular need to change this, because one person can only use so many shopping carts. If you maintain the price at "free", demand saturates and people stop stealing carts.
It's common for people to return carts to a designated area, and it's also not rare for people to just leave the carts somewhere convenient for them. Store employees periodically go around and move the carts back to the place where you expect to pick them up.
Costco is an interesting hybrid case. They make it easy to return the carts "correctly" by providing little depots scattered throughout their enormous parking lot. Realistically, the parking lot is so large that very few people would be willing to return a cart to the front of the store, where you get the cart from if you're going shopping.
However, people also aren't going to pick up carts from those depots deep within the parking lot and wheel them over to the store. So Costco employees still have to make rounds of the parking lot and move carts that have been left there to their correct location at the front of the store. But for Costco, you're supposed to leave the cart in the parking lot, but only in certain locations.
