Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for January 30, 2012
January 29, 2012
January 31, 2012
Transcript:
When the sun appears to be going down below the horizon during a sunset, it actually has already set! The image we see is a mirage created by the refraction of light. About 1.8 million shopping carts are stolen or lost every year in the United States! The walls of the Capuchin catacombs and Palermo, Italy, are lined with the bodies of about 8000 mummies, many posed upright, dressed in their finest clothes!
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Some shopping carts are taken by people without vehicles who want assistance in carrying their purchases home and then are too lazy to return the carts. I have seen them abandoned on street corners just a few blocks away from the store. (The laziness factor is also apparent in parking lots where they are left where the car happened to be rather than pushed back to a cart corral. At least in those cases there is no replacement cost unless they are hit by a vehicle, but it costs wages to have cart pushers rounding them up all the time!) Others are appropriated by people wanting to use them for their own purposes (the so-called "bag ladies, for instance) but usually that is one or two carts per person that continue to be used for years. The abandoned ones, unless someone notifies the store where to find them or does the kind deed of returning them, are lost to the store. At the store where I work it is hard to judge how many of the carts we just got last year are gone, but I know that the stock of hand baskets we had when I was hired has dwindled down to two for the whole store. Given how easily they are carried off, I somehow have my doubts that the store will spend the money to replace them, even though it is an inconvenience for shoppers only wanting to get a couple of items to have to use a full-size cart.