YouTube's Cart Narc weighs in on Phoenix's ordinance to rein in wayward shopping carts

The city of Phoenix is trying to tackle its stray shopping cart problem with a new ordinance aimed at retailers.

As of last month, retailers had to complete an annual certification saying they put wheel locks on their carts and providing the city with the number of carts they have. If the city has to return a cart to a store, they’ll have to pay a retrieval fee.

It’s aimed at reining in thousands of abandoned carts the city says it finds all over the place, which are often used by people experiencing homelessness.

This got The Show wondering: What would the Cart Narc have to say about this?

The Cart Narc is a social media star named Sebastian Davis, aka Agent Sebastian. On his YouTube page, he wears a bulletproof vest armed with a camera — and challenges people who don’t return their carts outside a grocery store.

The confrontations often gets ugly — and controversial. Even Dr. Phil accused him of public shaming.

But, he was happy to talk with The Show all about what he does — and how it all began.

Full conversation

SEBASTIAN DAVIS: It was literally just a conversation with a friend in the office and just commenting about the things that people do that are thoughtless, you know. Obviously littering would be kind of the top of that heap, but all the things fall underneath that leaving other things for other people to do that you know you should be doing.

And shopping carts were definitely one of those. And I'm very much a hands-on person. I said, well, I'll just go ask people because it's, it's one of the things I'm like, littering. You can see it happening. You know, you can watch the person walking out the door with a giant shopping cart and if they don't put it back.

And that's what I just started doing. And people started getting, you know, yelling, angry, threatening violence, all those things. And I'm not, even then or now, obviously I don't threaten them with anything. I'm trying to hurt them or damage them or other than their egos, I suppose. So it became sort of a, from there, just kind of one thing after the other as far as building what a Cart Narc is.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, and you started filming it at some point, or did you film it from the beginning?

DAVIS: Oh, from the beginning, yeah, because it was, and I know that lends an air of obnoxiousness to it, because when someone's got their phone out, you know, oh, something's going down. So that's why I quickly moved to like a body worn chest camera so that that wasn't the point, because that was especially when they see a phone out like, oh you're filming me, ah, you know? And there's certainly some issues with that as far as people playing gotcha, which I do to a degree.

GILGER: Yeah, and you wear like a bulletproof vest and you have like, you know, big kind of light up wand kind of things. Like, it says Cart Narc on your chest, right?

DAVIS: Yeah, I had just a T-shirt at first and then I had kind of a thing where I could strap a camera and then after people started threatening me with violence and in fact threatening to shoot me right.
A police officer who happened to be a fan of what I do said he had an old vest he was happy to share and uh, so yeah, that's luckily I haven't had to use it for its intended function. It's just a camera holder now. But yeah, it gets a little hairy.

GILGER: Yeah. So I mean, when was the decision to sort of make this your career, your mission, etc.? Like did this happen kind of by accident? It sounds like it just grew.

DAVIS: Oh yeah, for sure, it was a, if this, then what else? If I'm the type of person that does this, what kind of person would do that? Will he be sort of a do-gooder, Boy Scout type, and what would he call himself, and how would he address people? And will he be very polite, and he wouldn't cuss and curse and try to be angry with people? Well, you know, that's been my whole kind of philosophy has been, well, if this, then what else?

GILGER: Yeah, that's really interesting. So is it a character or is it something that you've developed for yourself that you really are now?

DAVIS: Well, it's a classic thing of where there's a lot of me in it, so I truly do believe in the cause. I really do care about carts. It really does irk me, and it's irked many other people before me. I'm not the first person.

You can go back. In fact, there's an old Peanuts cartoon from, I think, like 1991 or something where Woodstock and Snoopy, you know, and then Woodstock leaves his cart out and Snoopy's like, oh, that's one of those people. So I'm not the originator of the pet peeve. I'm just the kind of person who would do something about it.

GILGER: OK, this is based on the shopping cart theory.

DAVIS: The basis of the shopping cart theory is that it is a great middle ground. It's a great gray area because it is not illegal to leave your cart out per se, right. But it's also, it's, it, you know, you're supposed to do it. You know, it is, you the system, you where the cart rack is, you know how, you know where and how it's supposed to be returned, but you don't have to.

As I point out to people, when they say that to me, Not everything you do or don't do in life is because it is illegal. Sometimes it is just the right expected and ethical thing to do.

GILGER: I mean, so what you're doing, right, has been called, and I think Dr. Phil called it, right? Like public shaming. You would call it that, it sounds like, right?

DAVIS: Sure. Yeah, it is. And it's really just the carrot and the stick. The classic, you know, how do we motivate people? You, of course, can offer rewards or punishments. And we are social animals. We are social creatures. How we behave is largely affected by our peers, you know, and that's all I'm doing.

GILGER: You get a lot of pushback for this, I'm guessing, for like the way that you approach people or the kind of altercations you get in and benefiting off of that on social media. What's your response?

DAVIS: Well, yeah, that is now that it has been, you know, become to the small degree of quote, success that Cart Narcs has via Instagram or YouTube or whatever, people will now say, oh, you're just doing that for, for the money or the, you know, the notoriety, which is, you know, it's not like a, you are not a celebrity if you're a Cart Narc.

And the response I get is that, well, that that's, that's a logical fallacy. It's the argument from incredulity sort of meaning that you can't believe that I would actually care about this. Therefore you're giving, you're assigning to me the motive of profit.

And again, I had no idea this would be as successful as it is, you know, these things, things like Cart Narcs are organic. And the reason people follow it and watch it is because I think they really do get from me that I am, this is something I am concerned about.

GILGER: OK, how often do you go film in a parking lot and you approach someone and it's like totally no big deal? They say like, oh cool, yeah, I can put my car back, sorry.

DAVIS: That's probably 50% of the time.

GILGER: Really? It's half the time?

DAVIS: Oh, yeah. And what I really started doing is tagging those sort of encounters on the ends of my YouTube videos, especially. Yeah, my rough breakdown is probably half the time people are just nonchalant, like, oh, OK, no big deal, whatever.

And then the other half they either, they offer some sort of resistance, maybe half of that half, they'll put their cart back, but they'll give me a little lip or try to make an excuse. And the other half of that half, the other quarter of the time. They either won't do it and then in some fraction of that we'll have an altercation either verbal or further.

GILGER: So what do you make of this city of Phoenix ordinance, which is kind of putting the onus on the store, right, to make sure that their carts are kept in return, don't turn into, you know, a blight or nuisance or something like that.

DAVIS: Yeah, it's putting the bonus on the victim, essentially, because those carts cost money. I mean, your minimum probably for most stores is $150 and up for those carts. And it's odd that shopping carts are the sort of one thing, at least in the States here, that is like an acceptable shoplifting thing.

You can't go into that store and take shelving off the shelves and just carry that around and bring it to your house. But because of the class of people that typically do take those carts we are understandably sympathetic to them. But the store doesn't want their, they don't want the prices to go up, you know, and the customers end up paying for that, of course, because grocery store margins are notoriously thin. I think I see them around the 2% mark, maybe even lower. They just, they make their money on volume.

So they don't want to be losing big chunks of cash out on the street. And then have to then pay to retrieve those things. So the city also understandably wants to keep their streets clean. Really, it's the same thing. It's a gray area on all sides, but I don't think finding the store who doesn't wanna lose their property is the right solution.

GILGER: How often do you hear from folks whose job it is or has been to collect those carts?

DAVIS: Oh, yeah. All the time. In fact, when I'm out in a lot, that's who comes up and you know, shakes my hand and takes a photo is are those folks. Yeah, there are definitely times where a manager come out and walk me off the property.

But again, it's a 90/10 thing where the vast majority of those folks are happy to see me. I'm saying the kind of things to the customers that they can't say sort of stuff, you know.