I was in 2 grocery stores last night. First Pick 'n Save (a.k.a Push-n-shuv, Pick & Slave, Pick-n-Flick, Pink & Shaved, etc.) because my bank branch is in there.
Their parking lot has carts scattered all over the place even though there are plenty of cart stalls in the lot. People are lazy assholes. To damn lazy to walk 10 yards to put a cart in a stall? I’ve had my car dinged by carts and it pisses me off! :mad:
Then we went to Aldis to actually get groceries. How pleasant that there wasn’t a single cart loose in the lot. Why? Because one must insert a (refundable) quarter into a device in order to get a cart, and must park the cart back in the stall to get the quarter back.
People must be more greedy than lazy, as I’ve never seen a loose cart at an Aldis.
And there are more and more Aldis. So the investment on these cart devices can’t be an economic downfall.
How nice it is to have plenty of carts in the stall by the entrance door because they’re not all out in the lot.
How nice not to get ones car dinged by a loose cart in the lot.
Why don’t other stores have this? Surely it can’t be money. The amount they pay some high school schlub to bring in carts over time is much, much higher than the little coin device on the carts.
I hate it when stores do that. If there were two stores and all else being equal I would go to the store that did not make me put in a quarter for the cart. Although I can certainly see where a reasonable person might prefer, as you do, the store that makes you jump through the hoops for the cart.
The Aldi’s in Australia require a $2 coin but you can also buy one of these at Aldi for your keyring. As some councils in Australia are making trolley deposits compulsory they will become almost universal I guess.
Actually there was a conversation about that at the laundromat few days ago. Someone asked what happened to the 20 cent deposit for trolleys that existed many years ago. In those days enterprising kids used to hang around the parking lot and offer to return your trolley. Lazy bastards like me would often forego the 20c refund and let the kid take it back. There used to be no loose trolleys in the car park and also no idiots tearing around on tractors picking them up, as every supermarket has to employ now. Either that or the poor dude pushing a 20 metre line at snails pace through the car park.
But that’s not jumping through a hoop. It’s a mere coin that you’ll get back.
The “hoop”, as you so call it, is putting the cart back to get your coin. Big deal. While I normally detest social engineering, if this keeps the dents out of my car door due to lazy fucks, I’m all for it!
And if every store did this, you wouldn’t have to make a choice about it any way, would you? The only choice you’d have to make would be what store had the items/prices you like.
I never have change on me unless I’ve already bought something that day. Such a system would be quite annoying to me. Nevertheless, I still support it.
I agree with gazpacho. I always return my cart either into the store or into one of the corrals anyway. But I don’t like the store “forcing” me to do it. A quarter may be a trivial sum but I don’t like the idea in principle and I count it against any store that follows this practice.
I will be interested to see how many people are going to state that they hate being “forced” to do the right thing. It reminds me of those people who deliberately dawdle across pedestrian crossings to demonstrate their “power” over drivers.
And as I pointed out they have overcome the “needing a coin” problem in Europe and Australia.
Here in Akron, Ohio, if you don’t care about the quarter there are often kids who will take the carts back for the quarters. They are cheaper than Aldis hiring cart person.
It’s not that I dislike having to “jump through hoops” that makes me dislike these coin-deposits. It’s the unpleasantness of the implied assumption of guilt.
Whoooooah, that was a sudden shift, from “why don’t more stores do this”, to a very different question of “why don’t we legislate to require this”. I strongly suspect that anywhere where the latter is the case, the reason behind it was because of the problems caused by stolen trolleys being dumped, not to protect a few people’s paintwork.
I seem to remember a larger number of British stores using coin deposits ten, fifteen years ago than is the case now. Brakes on the trolleys which are activated at the exit of the car park have been an alternative more customer-friendly way of reducing the number which disappear.
I return carts more than 80% of the time, with the (less than) 20% being in parking lots with, like, three corrals spaced over the huge parking lot. So, I guess what I’d like to see is just good corral coverage, if the goal is to obtain 100% compliance.
But about the $0.25… $0.25?! That wouldn’t change my utility calculation one iota, except for the annoyance of remember to pack a quarter. At the rate I buy groceries, losing that deposit effective reduces my income by <0.01%. If my finances were that precise, I think I’d have other problems on my mind…
You have to ask someone for change, or offer them change for their cart. Or go in the store and ask someone at the cash register for change. Forces social behavior
All Dutch grocerystores have this system, and have had had it for at least ten years. They have to, as employer costs are higher in the Netherlands, and space for parking lots at a premium, so it is more expensive to have parking space wasted due to abandoned carts.
Many stores also give away the key-ring coins don’t ask mentions.
Many Dutch stores also have fancy electronic equipment on the carts that make it impossible to take them too far from the store. Once x metres distanced from the store, the wheels just block. That was done in part to discourage students from using the carts to transport crates of beer to their inner-city dorm houses, and abandon the carts there. Also, it was meant to discourage customers to take the carts to parking spaces too far from the store, as it was expected those customers would abandon the carts there, and they would never come back.
The estimated cost of a normal cart is about 350 dollars.
On a tangent, now that I’m talking about grocery shopping in the Netherlands, do you guys also have the self-scan equipment on your carts? You scan your own purchases, with a kind of laser gun attached to the carts. The computer inside the laser gun then adds the costs of your groceries. At the cash register, you hang back the laser gun, the machine prints your receipt, you pay, and you’re done. The cashier checks customers’ honesty at randomized intervals. It’s a great system.
We don’t have that, but some stores have self-scan checkouts. The bagging area is a scales, and each item has to be placed there (and be the correct weight!) after it’s scanned before you can continue.
This strikes me as an Extremely Bad Thing- simply because it’s unnecessarily doing people out of jobs. I saw a couple in Sydney when I was last there and refused to use them on principle.
That’s a straw man of course. PK doesn’t prefer jumping through hoops for a cart. He prefers having a parking lot that isn’t filled with carts. Check out what he wrote.
That is what gets me about this thread. It’s only a quarter. If I am otherwise disinclined to return my cart to the front of the store, the loss of a quarter isn’t going to persuade me to return it.
