The thread on returning shopping carts prompted me to vent a little on what I feel is yet another example of government regulation gone amuk.
I moved to Silver Spring Maryland last summer, and discovered that it is against the law to take your grocery shopping cart to your car. I discovered this when exiting the store and wondering why there were metal bars placed all around. Then I saw the sign–Maryland code XXX.XX prohibits taking shopping carts into the parking lot, punishable by a fine (exceptions for the handicapped, IIRC).
Why in the heck should a legislative body even have taken this up? I would not have so much of a problem if the store decided on a no-cart policy. Maybe they wouldn’t want to spend the money on extra workers policing the lots; maybe they wouldn’t want to worry about liability issues, etc… But it should be left up to the store, not government dictum. That way, people who liked the policy could shop there and people who found it too constraining could choose otherwise. What a concept–consumer choice and retailers tapping into what the customer wants.
Maybe this should be in GD, government intrusion into the minutiae of our daily lives and all that. Right now I don’t even own a car, so the situation in and of itself does not affect me directly; but the principle really cheeses me off.
In my town, you can take the cart into the parking lot, but you’re not allowed to take it out of the parking lot. I guess some people took it home and didn’t return it to the store.
A few years back, one of the stores allowed the carts to be taken home and you could leave it on your corner to be picked up by the store. I would guess that this probably caused trouble if a cart rolled out into traffic or kids took them to play with. And let’s face it, some people won’t take it seriously if it’s just store policy. Hell, a lot of times people don’t take it seriously even if it’s a law, so why would they worry about what a store says.
Yeah, but you are referring to a situation where carts leave the premises of the store/parking lot and end up scattered all over the neighborhood. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, but that passing a law that says you can’t even take the cart into the parking lot itself is a bit much.
How come it is that every place I’ve ever lived (and I’ve lived a lot of places), there was no problem in pushing the cart out to your car to unload groceries? Maryland, being the only exception that I am aware of, is either extremely enlightened or extremely screwed up. I vote the latter.
There are a few places in MD where they actually keep the carts in little corrals in the parking lot. If you want to have one while you shop, you had better grab one from the parking lot and you should also return it to the lot on your way back to your vehicle.
I can’t believe that there can be such an ordinance regulating the placement/movement of private property on private property.
I am a pedestrian most of the time. I buy my groceries at local Safeway, and ask the manager if I can take the cart home, and bring it back later. They were a tad bit leery about that, the first time. Now days, they don’t blink an eye, and have even mentioned that I should wait until tomorrow to bring it back, if it is getting dark.
On one trip back, I got stopped by a cop, and asked where I was taking the cart. I know it is not a usual sort of thing to see, but damn, I was walking toward the only Safeway in town, with a Safeway grocery cart, where the fuck did he think I was taking it? Do a lot of people steal grocery carts? What the hell do they do with them?
Ahhh, a question that takes me back to that wonderous I was employed in that most satisfying of professions, the supermarket Bag Boy/Cart Boy.
One major part of my professional responsibilities was to go around the parking lots and retrieve the carts from where kind shoppers left them. I would then have to hump this long train of carts back to the store to be left by the door so that the next batch of kind shoppers would not be inconvenienced by having to drag one all the way from where the last kind shopper left it in the parking lot all the way to the door.
Anyway, every few of weeks the store manager would take a couple of us in the store van and drive around town. There we would find that some of our kind shoppers had decided that walking home from the store would be more convenient if they had the assistance of a cart. However, frequently these kind shoppers would decide that is would be even more convenient if they were simply to leave the shopping cart at or near their house, rather than making the trek back to the store. In an effort to accomodate these kind shoppers, we would load whatever carts we found into the van and return them to the store. If we were lucky, we would get the carts before they had rusted into unusability, been hit by a train, or otherwise become unservicable.
Apparently some stores aren’t as accomodating as my old one was, and don’t consider shopping carts to be a public convenience to be used to trundle goods wherever required around town.
{{I know it is not a usual sort of thing to see, but damn, I was walking toward the only Safeway in town, with a Safeway grocery cart, where the fuck did he think I was taking it? Do a lot of people steal grocery carts? What the hell do they do with them?}}
Yes, a lot of people do steal carts. Around here, the homeless use them to carry their stuff. Kids use them as toys. Grownups (with homes) use them for general carting purposes, such as gardening.
I’ve read that even one of those carts costs around $200, and that was some years ago. Grocery stores have a VERY slim margin of profit. If they lose money to shoplifting, theft, whatever, I think that they have the right to try to keep costs down. They’ll only pass those costs on to us, you know.
Personally, if I was carting groceries home without a car, I’d put it in a duffle bag or buy my own cart. I lived in Spain for a year and a half, and I carried my groceries in a duffle bag. In the snow, uphill both ways.
Lynn
If it’s helpful, I’ll compare everyone to Hitler so we can get this
over with as soon as possible.
If it’s some sort of Maryland state law that you can’t take your cart to your car, then the stores I shop at (Food Lion, Rolands) aren’t exactly enforcing it. I take the cart to the car all the time.
RTFirefly, Maybe the law is only enforced in Montgomery County, I don’t know. I’ve lived here less than a year, and as I mentioned, the concept is new to me. The signs by the grocery stores specifically refer to Maryland code XX?-120A, as opposed to just a county statute.
IMO, it would seem to be a pain in the butt to have to leave your groceries by the front door of the store while you have to go get your car and swing back around to pick up your stuff, but maybe the people around here have gotten used to doing it that way.
If you can’t take the cart to the car, how do you get your groceries to you car? I can see carrying them by hand, when you’ve only got a few small bags. But what about when you do the major shopping excursion, as most of us do from time to time? Do you have to leave the cart at the door, and pull your car around? Or will someone from the store escort you to your vehicle? Yipes. That seems really inconvenient.
We don’t have that law here in Michigan. I personally always leave my cart in the area of the parking lot that is designated for carts, usually called a “cart corral.” People that don’t use these things bug me. But that’s another thread.
Changing my sig, because Wally said to, and I really like Wally, and I’ll do anything he says, anytime he says to.
I guess they must have to use parcel pickup if they have a cart full of groceries in Silver Spring, Maryland.
We have cart corrals here, in New Brunswick, which for the most part seem to cut down on the number of carts left in arrears. At one point in time you had to deposit a quarter to get a cart at some places, this seems like a good idea to me, afterall most people will walk the extra 3 feet to get their quarter back!
and because this IS the pit I will add, the cheap fuckers, and I will omit all smilies.
I think that boys cheese has slid right off his cracker!
-The Green Mile
In Chicago Aldi Stores have (or had) a system where you had to put a quarter in the shopping cart to get it. Then when you returned it it gave you your quarter back.
Also kids used to hang out by Grocery Stores and strong arm the old folk (because you couldn’t get the cart out past the front of the store) and you would have to tip the kids to carry the bags to your car. Of course if you didn’t and left your cart to drive your car up to the front, something happend to your groceries.
That’s absurd! Why the hell would a government body give a rats ass and waste tax payers money to pass such a law. Sounds to me that some politicians have too much time on their hands are inventing laws and sitting back and laughing their asses off.
Government stupidity at it’s finest.
divemaster, you should email the owners of www.stupidlaws.com I think this would be added to their list if they haven’t already!
You got it! That’s exactly what you have to do around here. And hope your groceries are still there when you make it back to the front of the store.
Humerous aside: Yesterday was my $200 grocery day. I don’t have a car right now, so I get a cab to come by and pick up me and my loot. Anyway, the cabbie gets out to help me load the trunk, and locks his keys in the car! With the engine running. Using a screwdriver, a tree limb, and two coathangers wired together, he finally got back in the car. My trip was free (for having to wait), but I tipped him well because I felt sorry for him. We can all do stupid things like that sometimes.
And I agree with techchick68’s recent sentiments exactly. In fact, that is exactly why I posted this in the first place.
I’ve lived in the Md. suburbs most of my life and that’s the way it’s been for a long time - I guess I’m used to it. Seems like a convenience to me, but then I hardly ever use a cart because it’s so hard to get around the store with people blocking the aisles. I use the small hand basket and lug it around the store and take my bags to my car. Before the stores started putting in the metal posts, I’d see the carts sitting on sidewalks, or yards, beat up and rusting away. The Giant grocery store I go to has an employee outside helping folks put their bags in their cars. BTW, there’s another thread about folks leaving their carts in parking spaces and bashing other cars with them.
I once saw someone toss a shopping cart off of the roof of Verducci Hall on the campus of San Francisco State University. Inasmuch as the said building was six or seven stories tall, the cart in question was reduced to about nine inches tall. I don’t remember if anybody in a van showed up to claim it.
TT
“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.” --James Thurber
I got two stories in one: the grocery store where I work now used to be a K-Mart, that (as you might imagine) closed. Around the neighborhood we don’t have much in the way of homeless, but the kids stole them and played with/in them. Towards the final days of the store’s presence, dozens and dozens were “stolen” and left . . . . . -down the street. Everywhere. You could stand anywhere in the neighborhood, and at night you could see at least one K-Mart shopping cart; during the day you would see three or four. I guess the few remaining employees didn’t give a flying f*** about doing anything about them, because kids played with them freely and casually and for months afterwards, a great mass of shopping carts orbited our neighborhood like the rings around Saturn.
Also: as far as that shopping-cart law goes, you don’t know who requested that it be passed. It could very well have been that the stores there were tired of losing money replacing stolen carts, but didn’t want to annoy their own customers by each store setting rules that they knew would inconvenience people. This law seems to be a convenient scapegoat; kinda the way the dairy industry “petitioned” the federal government to increase the amount of solids in milk some time back (-that way, dairy farmers get to sell more milk (per gallon, if you will) and you have to buy it, because that’s the new federal minimum standard, and the dairy farmers just shrug and say “It’s them Washington fellers’ rule , not ours”) - Put it this way: if the county board came to Joe’s Grocery Chain and said “We don’t want you to let your customers take your carts out onto your parking lot”, Joe would say “Fuck You. Them’s our carts, and that’s our lot, and these is our lawyers. Did we say Fuck You?” - MC