The only "innovation" with the trolleys is that USA used to be a wealthy enough country that it was OK to pay cart collectors. It's not a stupidity thing, it's a poverty thing.
I would actually say it’s a sign of income inequality. There is that much of a wage gap that your customers are basically paying someone to return their shipping trolley. Apparently this business model works in the USA, Im sure it would work in India or China, but definitely not in France or Sweden
That's an entirely incorrect premise. Every Walmart store has cart collectors. You can see them working throughout the day, collecting carts. Walmart is the largest retailer in the world and employs by far the most people, and they still do it.
Besides, the US is inflation adjusted wealthier today than it has ever been at any other point in its history.
On the poverty front, US poverty is dramatically lower than it was in 1960, and homelessness is near record lows. If you go back to ~1960-1973, the falsely perceived peak of US wealth, it was much worse to be poor in the US. In every possible regard a poor person was worse off in the US prior to 1980, than they are today. That's due to a massive expansion of the US welfare state over that time, which has led to many improvements. That includes healthcare (universal healthcare for the bottom 25% didn't exist; even in the 1980s far fewer people were covered), housing, food security, disability programs, et al.