Here in Lafayette, Louisiana(need to update my profile) if the police find a shopping cart in a neighborhood, they fine the store. Due to the amount of carts left around, the brilliant local government decided the best way to deter the problem was to punish the victims, the stores.
Each time I believe government can’t possibly get any worse, they manage to suprise me.
It does stay on your key ring. What you are missing is that each cart also has a chain with a rather complicated toungue that fits into a slot on the coin retention device. In order to release the token, or coin, you have to lock your the cart to another cart. Though it is a fairly simple mechanism, the point is that it would take more time and effort to “pick” than it would take to return the cart. The chain is positioned and sized so that the toungue can’t reach the slot on it’s own cart.
When they are nested, each cart locks to the one ahead of it. The last cart is locked to a wall or the cart-corral, whatever. If someone else left thier cart about, you could use it to unlock your token, but at least the parking clutter is cut in half, and a kid or homeless person would still have a reason to return the pair of carts. (one of them still has a deposit.
Note: I have only seen this when I was living in Vienna, Austria about 10 years ago, and modern, or american system might be different.
The token on the keyring is a fine idea, as you can’t drive off without your keys.
. . . a collapsible wheeled cart costs maybe $20 (not as much as they spend on groceries, and well worth it not to become a thief).
My grandma used to live next door to the market. She wasn’t a shopping cart thief but she absolutely refused to use a wheelie against all logic. She would make two trips to the market in a day if she had to or I would carry her stuff home for her sometimes. She thought that she would look strange because no one else used the wheelie carts and she didn’t want to be the only one or something. It wasn’t the money because Mom bought one for her and it just sat in the closet.
That may work for some, but many old folks can’t use them. With only two wheels, such a cart requires you to balance both it and yourself. With a “real” grocery cart, a person with poor balance, bad knees…whatever, can lean on the handle for support and balance. My mom had to explain this to me in order to keep me from “helping” by pushing the cart for her. Leaning on the cart is what allowed her to get around the store.
I don’t think it’s designed to prevent theft so much as to make one less job for the store (which reduces costs) and reduce lawsuits from cart-bashed cars - it certainly encourages everyone to bring their cart back to the Daisy Chain of Lust. I’m sure this, is some way, discourages loss, as there aren’t carts cavorting all 'round the lot to be snagged at random by a casual passerby. Of course it won’t stop someone who’s determined to get a cart.
Kind of like door locks - it stops nuisances and impulsive people, but not a determined thief. Luckily for us, the former far outnumber the later.
They do make carts that have wheels on all four corners.
No, I mean these four-wheeled jobbies. They’re practically walkers. I use one myself, and I’m damned close to “little old lady.”
Even if the shopper doesn’t care enough about a quarter to take the trouble of walking it back to the store, there will probably be someone who will – a kid, or a homeless person or something. Hey, if it’s worth picking up cans for a nickel, it’s worth rolling back carts for a quarter.
BTW, does anyone else automatically snag a cart on the way to the store? I figure that a cart that was used all the way from shopping to hauling the grub out to your car must be in good working condition. While the rack in the store gradually fills up with carts that have been rejected for having a wonky wheel or always pulling to one side or whatever. (I hate carts that don’t run straight.)
The great thing about deposit system is that it allows hustling neighbourhood kids to make a little coin, something I’m always in favour of.
Yep. I figure I’m helping out whomever has my old job.
I hadn’t heard of these locking devices before.
A while back my dad (not a senior) lived real close to the Safeway, less than half a mile, and there was a path with a tunnel under the street he had to cross. In good weather instead of driving to the store he would walk there, then walk back with a cart full of groceries. He kept the cart in his little condo-yard until the next time he went to the shopping center. He knew some of the employess, and I think he had permission to do it.
I hadn’t thought about the angle of other people, like kids, returning the carts to get a quarter…I’ll bet that does happen from time to time. I used to return empty pop bottles myself! 
This fits the mentality as I have observed it. Folks from this generation have a huge amount of pride, and it’s tied firmly to their self image as being self sufficient. I can only imagine the impact to your self image of surviving the depression, a world war and a lifetime of working in a machine shop. These folks have worked extremely hard all their lives. Now they are the poorest in their neighborhood, and wow but that has to suck.
The shopping carts aren’t the only type of behavior I’ve seen. I’ve put all my stuff on the conveyor belt to the register, and more than once one of these older folks has grabbed something out of my pile when I wasn’t looking. Not something I’d paid for yet, understand, just something I’d brought up to the checkstand. Once it went the other way, one of them snuck a few articles into my pile. One of the checkers explained to me that these folks have a tough time getting around the store and remembering everything they need. If they get up to the front and realize they’ve forgotten something, then see someone young enough to, in their opinion, run back across the store to get another package of salt or whatever, they feel justified in taking what they need from that person’s cart. The person who slipped items into my pile was probably someone who realized they couldn’t afford everything they had brought up and were too embarassed to say so to the checker.
This is far from an everyday occurrance. In the five years I’ve lived here, it’s happened maybe once a year. I’m pretty sure this is just the old feeling like the young owe them the respect of taking this mistreatment quietly (or something.) I could easily get angry over it - it’s certainly pit-able behavior - but it’s good karma to just deal with it. I don’t know that I ‘owe’ any of these people respect, but I’ll give it to them anyway - You don’t have to be old to understand that one step out of the nursing home or the grave is an awfully tough place to be.
As someone who used to work in a grocery store with those locks on carts (and a nifty escalator to get said carts to and from the undergrund parking garage, but I digress), I can tell you that all one needs to pop the quarter out is one of those plastic coffee stir sticks. Just jam that into the “slot” part about half an inch and wiggle, and out pops a quarter. On a good day when people would forget their carts around the garage, one could make a whopping 5 bucks in quarters.
That’s pretty big of you. I imagine that I would put up with such behavior silently for a while, but it would only be a matter of time before I arrived home to find myself one pilfered ingredient short of a recipe and had to go to the store again.
If they’d say something, I’d be happy to help out. More than once I’ve given the folks ahead of me in line something out of my cart when they saw it, mentioned that they forgot to get it, and were about to send someone off to retrieve it. I can give mine up and go get another one faster than I can sit there and wait while they go off searching before the checker can complete their order. But just silently taking something I’ve shopped for is incredibly rude.
Most (if not all) supermarkets in Germany (and now Aldi here in the US) have the coin-deposit/release gizmo on them and this works fine, and saves on labor.
I have never seen a shopping-cart person in Germany, so I do not believe theft of them is a problem there.
May I please add a mini-rant of my own on those shopping carts resembling automobiles which in an aisle look about the size of a small bus?
You see these in Publix and Ingles here in Georgia, and yeah, I guess they keep the little ones happy, but damn, maneuvering around those things can be a pain in the Arsch!
Thanks
Q
Yeah, it’s incredibly rude, no question. I guess it doesn’t bother me because it’s so pathetic. Same with the carts. I can’t feel anything but sorry for them. At the same time, I respect the hell out of them - the effort it takes for them to get to the store and back is probably similar to climbing a mountain for you or me. But hard as it is just to get through the day, they refuse to give up. It’s no excuse for cart theft or other rude behavior - but some forms of rudeness are easier to take I guess.
Now SUV drivers who cut me off in traffic - they just piss me the hell off. That’s the kind of thing I put *my * energy into getting angry over. 
Well besides seniors, who else steals the carts? I always thought it was poor people who didn’t have cars, and had to walk or take the bus to the store. That is no excuse to steal and dump carts, but I wonder what other solutions grocery stores can provide for people like that? Maybe they could offer “drop off” service for anyone within a certain radius of the store. They could have a van that takes the person and the groceries back to their house, maybe for a nominal fee.
