That's not a protest, that's being a dick.

Whirl-Mart is a culture jamming ritual aimed at retail superstores and described by participants as "art and action."

An event consists of a group of supposed shoppers who congregate at a large superstore (usually a Wal-Mart, Toys "R" Us, ASDA, or Sainsbury's) and slowly push empty shopping carts silently through store aisles. Participants will not purchase anything and seek to form a lengthy chain of non-shoppers, continually weaving and "whirling" through a maze of store aisles for up to an hour at a time. Participants describe their actions as "a collective reclamation of space that is otherwise only used for buying and selling". Whirl-Marters seek to mimic and mock what they perceive as the absurdity of the shopping process.

Some variations of the whirl-mart protest involve filling carts but then simply abandoning them or, when checking out, claiming to have forgotten the money to purchase the items in the overflowing cart.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirl-Mart

Whirl-marting, fine whatever.That's fine. That's kind of funny. But the "some variations" is pretty alarming. As someone who has worked in retail, all you're doing is making underpaid employees work harder and stay later (without pay, I might add) to put back the shit you "subversively" gathered. I guess those culture jammers don't have a real strong grip on how the retail business works. See, the scummy leadership doesn't work in the stores. Thanks for protesting consumerism by making me stay an hour late, dude. I'm a wiser person for being more tired, having less free time, and not being able to negotiate because I have to pay rent. I guess buying things and working is sort of absurd if you've always just had money and nice things and have no idea where they came from.

I don't mean to represent this downtrodden proletarian. I'm solidly middle class. I got a 6 dollar a week allowance when I was 13. On my own, I've always had enough money for food (though sometimes it was ramen and canned beans) and so on. But I want people to think about this stuff, in between family vacations in upstate new england and buying organic vegan food that costs five times more than what everyone else consumes. There's no shame in being middle class or even filthy rich, but please, don't let your hip new faux-revolutionary proletarian identity hurt working people, who have enough bullshit to deal with as it is. It's not a world for you to play around in, a place to make you feel moral, or place to make you think your pranks are making things better. People are trying to live here, and shopping carts full of shit they have to put back isn't helping