Shopping Cart Problem
Noun Phrase · Slang & Abbreviations
Definitions
A reference to a social-behavior test about whether people do the right thing without enforcement, applied metaphorically to teamwork and maintenance habits. In engineering slang, it describes tasks everyone benefits from but no single person is forced to do.
In plain English: A problem about whether people do the right thing when no one is forcing them to.
Example: "Cleaning up stale feature flags was a shopping cart problem, obviously good for the codebase but easy for each individual team to defer indefinitely."