I recently watched a video of shoplifters getting busted. I’m wondering though if shopping cart thieves ever get into trouble. Once you’ve taken a shopping cart off store property, aren’t you breaking the law? I see people pushing shopping carts down the street quite often, but has anyone ever been busted for it?
Years back when I worked in a large city, we got an occasional call from the police to go some place and retreive the stolen carts. I had to collect about 15 one time at a bus stop on the end of a dead end street. Way back them the store manager told me they were $150 a piece to purchase. Security did stop people from leaving the parking lot with them if they caught them. I saw a police car talking to somebody with one of our carts off store property one day. I doubt unless somebody stole a tremendous number of carts at one time, if the police would run a round looking for carts. They did call if they happened apon them.
Do you want the police working on rapes, murders, sexual assualts, burglaries, writing speeding & parking tickets (that generate revenue), etc., etc. or do you want them retrieving shopping carts?
As with every civil thing, it’s a matter of resources.
Most large grocery stores around here have brakes on the cart wheels that lock if someone tries to take the cart off store property. That makes it real hard to push them beyond the parking lot, so they get left at the edges there.
One less crime for the police to have to pursue (and our neighborhood relieved of the unsightly abandoned carts everyshere).
Why is the deposit system Aldi uses so unpopular? Unlike every other supermarket I’ve been to I’ve never seen carts scattered everywhere or rolling around the parking lot at Aldi.
Huh? How does that work?
I’d be happy if they’d just do something about the shopping cart thieves that leave the carts at the bus stop next to my house. I’m thinking of putting up a camera out front to catch the thieves on film then distribute their pictures at the stores where they steal the carts.
I’m assuming that the system alphaboi refers to is like the one used by some supermarkets in Britain, i.e. the shopping trolleys/carts are all chained together, and one releases one by inserting a £1 coin into a slot. No, it’s isn’t very much money, but it seems to be enough to ensure that people normally park their trolley again in its row of its trolley friends in order to retrieve the coin.
I should imagine that it would normally be tiresome annoying kids who would steal the trolleys and abandon them, and they may be less likely to deposit £1 just for the fun of pushing a trolley for a walk and making the place untidy. (Of course, it gets amusing if you were planning to pay by debit card and might have enough cash with you, but NOT a £1 coin - perhaps lots of smaller change, or larger coins or notes, or even £1 notes, the last one being somehow particularly annoying. So then you get to accost other shoppers with requests to act as money-changer. )
[* edited because I meant “deposit” not “donate”.]
Other supermarkets don’t require the “deposit” money, but they have trolleys which will lock wheels and refuse to move after a certain point.
In some cities they don’t do anything about the ones stolen by the Homeless as it’s not PC.
But otherwise- it’s a minor crime, difficult to enforce, and hell to haul those carts around.
Just like the ‘invisibe fence’ for dogs. They bury a wire around the perimeter of the store property; it signals to the brakes on the cart when they pass it, and the brakes lock up the wheels.
I walked by a cop car pushing a shopping cart a few times and nothing was ever said to me. I live between two markets and I take the cart that belongs to the market I am currently not visiting, but the roads between them curve so they had reason to suspect I had stolen them and was pushing it away rather than pushing it toward.
Thanks. I just found it interesting how the shoplifters in the video are tackled and dogpiled and the police are called, while shopping cart thieves get a stern talking to at most.
Funny story I have about that system.
I used to work for a large department store which had this mechanism on their carts. Sometimes I would work as the cart attendant, i.e. retrieving the carts from the parking lot and bringing them back inside.
Anyway, this department store happened to be inside a much larger shopping complex, and quite often normal shoppers who weren’t necessarily trying to steal the carts would take them to the boundary of the perimeter and attempt to push them across, despite multiple warning signs and a yellow strip on the ground with “No shopping cart” symbols (think “no smoking” signs, but with a picture of a shopping cart) painted on it.
Of course, every time some grandma strolling along with her daughter and 5 grandkids (naturally paying no heed to the warnings) tried to cross the boundary while pushing the cart, the brakes would inevitably lock up and she would nail herself in the stomach with the handlebar. Oh I laughed, and I laughed, and I laughed. I witnessed this frequently - that was one of the perks of that job.
I don’t know this for absolute certain, but you’re allowed to take shopping carts away from many supermarkets here. As long as you leave them out in the open for retrieval by roaming employees sent out to get them back.
I’ve never done it, myself, in case my assumption about this is incorrect, but my observations seem to suggest it.
One of the assistant managers at the Walgreens where I work once got so fed up at a chronic shopping cart “borrower”–one of our local regulars–that she pursued him into the court system. She said it was like pulling teeth to get the police interested, and only by dint of intense personal effort did anything like a prosecution get under way.
So no, the police aren’t terribly interested in shopping cart theft.
The Orange County Jail in Orlando, Florida uses a variety of different shopping carts so they must not be illegal to steal. 
So prosecuting someone who steals a pair of pants that costs the store say 10 to 15 bucks is allocating good resources and giving someone a pass for taking a $150 cart is not?
:dubious:
I live near a train station, and there’s a little pond near the tracks, and one time I saw a shopping cart halfway down to the bottom.
Yep. Except that, around here, if you had to insert a £1 coin to get a cart, I could see why that would piss people off. 
Coming next season on NBC – Law and Order: Shopping Cart Bureau