Dateline: To Catch a Shopping Cart Thief
Out into the parking lot, yes, but not out onto the street blocks away from the store. However, the neighborhood stores where I shopped in the city had metal blockades so the carts can’t leave the immediate area right by the store.
My guess would be that those are viewed as different types of problems in the big picture.
Few people take the carts, a minority of those intend to keep them, and the handful who do keep them only want one. Potentially, most carts will be recovered.
Lots of people steal merchandise, many of those will continue to do so if not stopped, and sometimes it’s stuff that costs way more then 10, or even 150, bucks. Hardly any of it gets recovered.
Ask stores what their total yearly losses are on shopping carts as opposed to merchandise and I’ll think you’ll see that aggressively pursuing shoplifters makes a lot more sense than going after cart-snatchers.
I’m sure the markets are not at all happy about this. They have to pay those employees to roam around, you know, and that adds up to higher prices on the merchandise for everyone. I think that they don’t allow it so much as they are resigned to it.
I have now looked up some pertinent information, and it would appear my theory is incorrect, and it is in fact against the by-laws to remove shopping trolleys from a shopping centre beyond the car park, in Australia.
So everyone I see doing it are really breaking the law.
If I see a shopping cart on the street when walking to the market, I will bring it there.
What the cop car was doing pushing a shopping cart, I’ll never know.
In the big picture, the choice is who pays for shopping cart security, society as whole (through the cops and courts) or the shopping cart owners? When the question is who should act, the best answer is whoever is in the best position to solve the problem. As the above discussion of various ways the stores can control shopping carts suggests, the owners, the ones who create the shopping cart problem, the ones who profit from shopping cart availability, and the ones who control the design and placement of the carts are in the best position.
So let the cops do something more important.
Our town has a service that retreives shopping carts and takes them back to their stores.
It’s a question of letting our town’s very large elderly population walk off with the carts, or insisting that they all drive to the store and back. :eek:
One store in my area lets you take the cart home. They hold one single bag of your groceries as “insurance”.
When you bring back the cart, they give you your last bag of groceries.
Ooh, I think I like the sound of that system, LurkerinNJ. (And welcome to the SDMB 
) I could imagine it being very useful when there were lots of heavy things involved. However, suppose I chose to make use of their shopping trolley, leaving behind one bag of shopping as a “hostage”, but I made sure that the shopping left behind was only a few cheap things - if I then didn’t bother returning the shopping trolley, I would still have stolen the thing, I suppose.
Aldi’s system uses a quarter. 
Heh, well, I’m not familiar with U.S coinage.
As a tangent, there are also several charities (Marie Curie Cancer care comes to mind) who have hit on the bright idea of selling little key rings with a little “fake coin” thingy attached, the idea being that the charity gets some money for selling you the key-ring and you always have a “coin” of exactly the same size as the £1 coin with you. N.B. The things are not at all intended to be counterfeit coins: they are just little objects with the charity’s logo or whatever upon them. Of course, if you lock yourself out of your home and then go shopping, you will still have problems. 
(One bad thing about this coin system, however - if you are very impecunious, then it’s a damn nuisance that you have enough money for some bread, vegetables, mil, whatever, BUT the need to deposit a pound just to get a trolley thing is damned annoying, if it would leave you without enough cash to buy the food.)