See, when you get sick after eating at a restaurant, you probably tell everyone you know -- restaurants get a bad reputation in a hurry. But if something from your kitchen makes you sick, would you ever think to blame the grocery store?

As we are fond of pointing out , the only thing that surpasses mankind's loving relationship with food is the food industry's willingness to abuse said relationship at every opportunity. Your grocery store is no different -- every time you visit that behemoth food chain, you're stepping into a confusing fluorescent-lit maze of lies. And by lies, we mean dead rats.

5 There Is Poop on the Shopping Carts

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You know those hobos who cart their entire material fortune with them in a battered, filthy shopping cart, only for it to be demolished in a chase scene from an '80s buddy cop movie? Those carts, while filthy, are probably cleaner than the one you just loaded your week's worth of TV dinners into. That's because there is a better than good chance that the shopping cart you grabbed when you embarked upon your grocery quest is stained with poop. A 72 percent chance, according to research. There's also a 50-50 chance that the cart you grab comes with a special side order of E. coli.

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And a 100 percent chance that you grab the one with the fucked up wheel.

Are the night janitors getting drunk on the job and mistaking the shopping carts for toilets? Actually, this, like so many other hazardous shopping experiences, is because of children. They have a habit of sticking their hands everywhere, and as such they tend to carry trace amounts of fecal matter -- among other things -- about their person at all times. Imagine that poop-encrusted toddler sitting in your shopping cart before you got hold of it, just smearing his hands on everything, as kids are wont to do. Now imagine 10,000 kids in the cart, pulling a nonstop poop-smearing orgy, and you get a basic idea of the public toilet that you're using to store your fresh produce.

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"On the plus side, all of our feces is organic and locally shat."

Because guess what -- that cart hasn't been cleaned in a while, if ever. Think about it: When's the last time you've seen employees at your local grocery store hosing down the carts? Never, because it's just not part of the program. It'd be a losing battle anyway, when you consider how many people use the cart in a day, and how many nooks and crannies there are for all sorts of microscopic bullshit to thrive in.

"But Cracked," you reasonably inquire, "what about the sanitizing wipes most stores have right next to the shopping carts? Surely those can be used to clean away all that crap." They can help, sure enough -- if you're willing to take 20 minutes per shopping trip to thoroughly wipe every inch of a device that is essentially a wheeled basket made of tiny secret microbe lairs. But even then, the only way to get them really clean would be to spray them with a cloud of disinfectant, or maybe run them through a car wash or something, after every use. But nobody does that, so poop carts it is!