Jesus! Those are some high tech carts! We have the quarter thing at Aldi, but that’s as far as it goes. Wireless? You are George Fucking Jetson, my friend.
Heh… we’ve had those for years. Cart theft being pretty bad in residential areas, and with carts costing hundreds of dollars each, it’s the most recent evolution in anti-theft devices, since the quarter things don’t work well anymore. Generally one wheel has this device on it that communicates with some central wireless monitoring device, and if it goes out of range, the device locks the wheel. It’s kind of an automotive boot for shopping carts.
The side effect of that is that you get dumbasses who don’t understand why it suddenly won’t go, so they literally push and drag the damn thing until they get tired of wrestling with it. Because the wheel is locked, and because there are a lot of dumbasses (there’s signage everywhere warning what happens if the carts are taken beyond their boundaries – generally defined as “the parking lot” to make it easy to understand) the wheel rubber wears down in one or two spots and you end up with gimpy carts that make thump-thump noises every revolution.
They’ve tried to fix that by changing the lock to a spring-loaded metal bracket that snaps down to the ground when it’s triggered, effectively jacking the cart up. That’s relatively new though.
I found a website. Carttronics. I don’t know how much they cost but I’m very impressed! Damn…nothin’ like medium tech.
I wonder if these carts could also incorporate a speaker system that would (when removed from the “zone”), scream
Over and over at about 110 decibels
I wouldn’t doubt they’re probably double what normal carts cost, plus the cost of the base station, but I guess when you factor in the cost of replacements, it’s probably worth it to the average grocer. And it’s better than passing theft costs on to the consumer.
That would be awesome. I’d rather they talked to directly to them though.
“Hey. Dumbass. You can’t take me home. Get our shit out and carry it.” (Works best when said in the voice of Brian Doyle-Murray)
They do actually have progressive warning alarms on them that chirp when you’re close to leaving the zone, then get more persistent when you’re about at the end of your digital rope. They seem to confuse and perplex clueless shoppers trying to wheel the things home. Either that or they think the cart’s bluffing.
Why did you not say something then?
You apparently missed the whole part about how everyone else does this, too. It’s kinda hard to call people out on something if you know there are other people that do the same thing. They’ll just point out that everyone else does it. And it’s already been pointed out that calling in the management does nothing, so that’s as far as it would go.
Plus there’s the simple fact that, if someone knows you are the one objecting, that they will attempt to make your life miserable. For example, did you see the response of that poster who got a “citizen’s ticket” on their car? Yeah.
Pretty much this, yeah. I could have pointed it out to them but that just would have just created problems I don’t need, and they would have plead ignorance anyway. They’re clearly not particularly interested in what’s right, so they’ll just try to excuse themselves in whatever way they can. Though parking the cart beside my apartment door was a pretty open act of passive aggression for some reason – if they did that when I didn’t say anything (didn’t even give 'em a stink-eye), one has to wonder what they’d do if I called them on it right there and then.
The one I read about will lock up if you try to steal a cartload of groceries, and can sense if the items on the bottom rack haven’t been scanned. Who knew?