You're a goddam cart thief, and they should call the cops on you.

The BBQ Pit
1

In recent years (or just in the neighborhoods where I’ve lived in recent years) it seems to be in fashion to buy your groceries, put them back in the cart, and then push that cart as much as a half-mile down the road to a bus stop or to your apartment complex, at which point you abandon the cart.

These carts experience substantial wear and tear on these journeys, far more (and more severe) bumps and dips than they were designed to tolerate, and the rough, gravelly outdoor surfaces are hard on the wheels (carts are designed to tolerate a tenth of a mile across the parking lot to your car, not a half-mile down the road).

And then you just leave the cart there by the side of the road, cuz you know someone will pick up after you. Wait, that’s giving you too much credit: you leave the cart there because you don’t need it anymore and you don’t give a flying fuck what happens to it after that.

I’ll tell you what happens. Whereas in civilized places a store employee moving under his own power can visit cart corrals in the parking lot and round up a couple dozen carts in under two minutes, now this guy has to use a pickup truck and travel everywhere within a half-mile radius (or more, cuz there’s always some showoff willing to push his groceries even farther than that) and look for randomly located carts. I don’t feel bad for him - afterall, he’s getting paid - but that takes time and money, which means our groceries cost more.

The store owner doesn’t like this. He has to pay the guy to go and get them, and if any are damaged or can’t be found, he needs to replace it.

The city doesn’t like this. The carts clutter up the edges of the road like the skeletons of giant dead bugs, and so they’re fining grocery stores that don’t gather their metallic diaspora soon enough.

I don’t like this. You’re making my groceries more expensive.

The stores put up signs begging customers not to remove carts from the premises, but to no avail.

So fuck all y’all selfish bastards. Go buy your own damn cart, and leave store property at the store.

2

A lot of stores in my area are going to a system that somehow (I admit to ignorance of just how this works) will lock the cart’s wheels when it crosses a line at the edge of the parking lot. Employees somehow can unlock the wheels to roll the cart back where it belongs.

3

This is one of my peeves, too. There are little grocery carts available for about $20 that you can use to haul your groceries home; I’ve used one for years now, and they work just fine. Taking a shopping cart from the store and leaving it somewhere else is a douche move, plain and simple, and yes, it is stealing. If I run across one of these when I’m out walking, I’ll take it back to the supermarket, but I feel like hanging a sign on it that says, “I’m not stealing it; I’m returning it.”

It’s just another symptom of the, “I got mine, and to hell with the rest of you” world we’re living in.

4

Here you need to free the trolleys/carts from the corral with a coin or token which stays in the trolley until you hook it back up to another. This leads to them still being abandoned except people take tools to the coin release part to get the coin back meaning the trolleys can’t go back in the collection at the supermarket without going to the repair shop first. It must cost them a fortune. Lately I have seen a number of trolleys on the street with wheels missing, given how poorly shopping trolleys move I wouldn’t trust the wheels myself but someone here is making something.

5

It works like those “invisible fences” for dogs.

6

That’s an unusual system. What I’m familiar with but haven’t seen utilized in grocery stores is the Smarte Carte system, where the row of carts is attached to a machine. Deposit your coins, take a cart from the end. Get the deposit back when you put the cart back into the row.

As far as I’m aware this works great. Either people are more conscientious about returning the cart for their deposit, or kids looking for a quick buck keep an eye out for abandoned carts and return them.

Smarte Carte apparently only does airline luggage carts and strollers. I’m honestly surprised they don’t have a similar solution for grocery carts.

7

You mean, it will produce a painful shrill sound and/or mild electric shock in people who try to cross it with a cart? Sweetness!

8

I’m sure I posted this before.

Was a slow build up of carts in the basement of my apartment complex a while back. From Walmart 1/2 mile away, the grocery store 1 mile away, and from TJ Maxx about the same distance in another direction. I told the managers at both Walmart and the grocery store about the issue. Nothing happened. A month later the number of grocery store carts had reached the high teens and I said something again to them. One of the assistant managers got pissy with me, said they had called the complex and been told they had no carts belonging to the grocery store. Another couple of weeks later I took a picture of all the carts down in the garage level. Over 50 of them from the three sources, and sent it to the grocery store corporate headquarters (23 of their carts in the picture).

Two days later the grocery store carts were all gone.

Even now, months later, we never get to having more than 3 or 4 before they come pick them up.

Still probably 10-15 Walmart carts at any given time. Fuck 'em if they weren’t interested in coming to get them.

9

And in all honesty, I’m not 100% clear on how those work. Explanation, please?

10

That I would endorse. And I would spend a lot of time hanging out in supermarket parking lots to watch people get zapped.

11

One can only wish!

12

From the store’s POV, you may be a goddamned cart thief, but you’re also a regular customer, and the carts you take don’t go far and do make their way back to the store with only some bother. Isn’t it a possibly reasonable business tactic to continue to put up with it quietly?

13

Given the cost of the carts? probably not

14

VooDoo magick.

15

The wheels, usually just one of the front wheels but sometimes more than one of them, has an electronically controlled lock on it, containing a receiver. A wire is embedded all around the perimeter of the store and parking lot. When the cart crosses that perimeter, the device receives a “lock” signal and the lock engages, preventing the wheel(s) from rolling.

To retrieve the carts from beyond the perimeter, the store employees have a transmitter device, probably in the form of a small key fob, which emits the “off” signal and unlocks the cart (as long as the fob is within a certain short distance of the cart).

16

The Target near me (Evanston, IL) has the cart “fence” installed and I always laugh at all of the carts stuck right near the entrance to the parking lot where the cart-stealers’ had to leave them on their way out.

17

That sounds like a lot of trouble when they could just use a real fence and some invisible paint.

18

Probably not. Grocery stores do not have huge profit margins. I don’t have a cite, but I expect the cost of retrieving a cart – particularly when that involves sending an employee in a pickup truck to troll the streets for it–outstrips the profit from selling what was in the cart. Likewise, the people who do it once tend to do it over and over, so the store isn’t making much if any money from them.

19

There are a bunch of shopping carts in my apartment building and a couple of the giant carts can barely fit in the smaller of the two elevators. Once I was entering the building when another tenant on his was back from Costco or the supermarket asked me where the carts were. “At the store?” was my reply. I think it’s really obnoxious to openly use a shopping cart to move stuff from your car downstairs to your apartment upstairs. (And also, there are usually several carts clutter up the hallways and obstructing access to the emergency stairwells.)

20

Ignorance on this point cured. Many thanks!