So you park your car in the shopping center parking lot, a couple of safe spaces from a carriage corral. You get out. You grab a carriage from the carriage corral. As you do this, you notice a double-roll package of paper towels in the lower tray of one of the other carriages. Having watched almost every episode of “Monk,” you use your superficially-developed detective logic to deduce that an earlier shopper had left it there. Someone had forgotten to pack it for the ride home.
What would you do?
- Grab it quickly, while no one’s looking, and toss it into your car. It wouldn’t be the first time you went Finder’s Keeper’s on something somebody else paid for. When I worked part-time for both WBAL-TV and WBAL-AM, someone left a Near-Cashmere coat on a rack in the TV newsroom. It was there for a year and, as winter 1984 approached, I decided to make it mine. It was big and brown and warm, with a silk lining and this label: “KASHMERE. Dry Clean Only.” A couple of decades later, while I worked at WYPR-FM, someone left a black leather bomber jacket in a closet in what served as the station’s green room. I gave that one nearly two years before declaring ownership. . . . I don’t think the paper towels would last as long, so a much quicker decision would have to be made.
- Leave it where you found it with the thought that the shopper might notice the missing paper towels and drive back to the supermarket parking lot in the hopes of recovering them. Considering the price of groceries these days, it’s not a far-fetched notion.
What did this writer do?
I decided on No. 2 and I’ll tell you why: Reciprocity . . . . Four years ago, a hiker on Grabby Trail, along the Gunpowder River in Baltimore County, found a fishing net that I had lost a few days earlier. Instead of taking it home, he or she left it on a sign by the trail. I was shocked to find it there when I returned. (Follow this link for the full story.) . . . So that’s why I left the paper towels where I found them, to return a favor to a stranger: Reciprocity. It’s what the world needs now . . .
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Dan Rodricks 
It’s common decency. I found keys outside my row house and left them along the edge of my garden in case the owner returned. You did good, each and every time.
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Thanks!
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Or return it to the store and let them know that a customer accidentally left it in their cart. Most likely the customer will call the store to inquire (before someone snatches it from the cart.)
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