Daily Inspiration Quote by Erma Bombeck

Bombeck’s genius is to make petty crime feel suddenly monstrous by picking the most ridiculous possible comparison and then playing it straight. A shopping cart is the blandest symbol of suburban convenience: anonymous metal, corporate property, engineered to disappear into parking lots and reappear in neat rows. By asking "Why would anyone steal a shopping cart?" she frames the act as not just illegal but psychically baffling, an offense against the unspoken social contract that keeps everyday life frictionless.

Then comes the twist of the knife: "It’s like stealing a two-year-old". The line is funny because it’s so wildly disproportionate, yet it lands because it exposes what the cart really represents in late-20th-century America. The cart is communal infrastructure for private consumption. Take it, and you’re not just taking an object; you’re breaking the choreography of errands that depends on everyone behaving. The toddler comparison sneaks in a moral panic about vulnerability: a two-year-old can’t defend itself, can’t consent, can’t be replaced without trauma. Neither, in Bombeck’s suburban theater, can the small systems that make life livable.

The subtext is class and domestic order: cart theft suggests scarcity, spite, or indifference creeping into a world built on abundance and politeness. Bombeck’s humor doesn’t moralize with sermons; it weaponizes maternal outrage and civic common sense. By inflating the stakes to the edge of absurdity, she makes the reader feel how fragile "normal" actually is.