In large metro areas like Los Angeles, there are companies that troll the neighborhoods and pick up abandoned carts, then return them to the proper markets. They’re called “Cart Return Services.” I don’t know how they charge, but it relieves the individual markets of the responsibility, and everything on one street gets picked up at once.
When I lived in L.A., a market close to me tried several schemes, but none of them worked. The drop-down front wheel was a pain in the ass for a customer, since if you tilted the cart back just a little, the spoiler dropped down and you couldn’t push the cart. You’d be surprised how fast an employee shows up with the release gadget if your cart is slamming against the aisles, knocking displays over left and right.
Then they tried cement pillars closely spaced so you couldn’t move a cart between them, and you could only take them to a few feet outside the market, where you were supposed to leave them and go get your car. This caused large pileups of carts and cars at the doors and I’m sure they lost a lot of business.
And some shoppers, even with a fully-loaded cart, could take the entire cart and lift it over the pillars using several family members (big families, low income district), and away they went as usual.
In some neighborhoods, the shopping cart was the standard, all-purpose transportation vehicle so some people got pissed when the cart return services “stole” back their carts.
There is such a system, if not widely used. An Aldi’s near me has that. In that case it’s just to save them the cost of an employee to gather carts from the parking lot. Here in the 'burbs no one is walking their groceries home, cart or no cart.
Years ago in Savannah, it became an annual tradition for college kids to band together from different schools on one night and swipe all the carts they could from everywhere around town and put them in the local mall parking lot.
Morning would dawn on thousands of carts virtually circling the mall. It apparently took days for every store to send trucks and workers to retrieve their carts. After getting caught, I don’t think they do that anymore.
It got me thinking. Low-life asshats have been stealing carts and taking them to the bus stop, home, or wherever for years. If I round them up and offer to sell them back to the store, am I dealing in (clearly) stolen property, or is there some abandoned property loophole that I can use?
Obviously a Publix or Wal-Mart cart belongs to them, even if it gets misappropriated. However, if a cart sits unclaimed for some period of time - usually within sight of a store - can I lay claim to it?
If I just offered a cart return service, could I force money out of the store, or can they just claim ownership forever and tell me to go piss up a rope?
I kind of like my wife’s idea. Set up a cart return agreement with Publix, say 5 bucks a cart. It beats buying new ones for 300, right? Then just go to Publix #1, grab some carts and take them to Publix #2, and collect money. Rinse, repeat. Just charge them to move carts from store to store. They’d never know!
And no one has mentioned the homeless who find these abandoned carts and turn them into their Wire Winnebagos, pushing the around town without anyone realizing that these things aren’t sold or given to the homeless?
In fact, I’m applying to be your ammo boy. I’m good at reading the wind/distance and giving advice: “You’re gonna have to lead Granny Clampett there, she’s got a tailwind.” And I’ll keep your stats.
btw, I’m a lot more sympathetic when I see a homeless person with a cart, than an entitled douchebag. So I wouldn’t paintball them…
At my store, we’ve even had cases of people driving the electric scooters off the property and abandoning them half a mile or further away. (Let me tell you, it takes forever to drive one of those things back.) After the last incident, we welded big steel poles to all the scooters so they can no longer clear the front door of the building.
We have one of these setups in England. Pay £1 in to take the trolley from the chain (a little more difficult in the US since $1 coins are rarer and not worth as much as a pound). I think they use the “invisible fence” in England too.
The system noted above is used everywhere I’ve shopped in Western Canada - most stores cost a quarter to free the cart at the end of the link, but some stores use a loonie (dollar coin). Some places the carts are free (like Walmart), and they have the worst problems with carts left everywhere in the parking lot (and I assume stolen).
By Og, that’s why I love the Dope. I could have sworn this douchebaggery was confined to our town. I am torn between relief and alarm that it happens everywhere.
Yes, but the Target in Evanston (we’re talking about the one on Howard, right?) has that annoying huge parking lot shared with a bunch of other stores, and they’re all wired separately and NOT FUCKING LABELED WITH YELLOW PAINT! Last time we had the Shopping Cart Thief Thread, I ranted about how I was trying to be a good girl and walk more and not drive and park and drive again to move my car, but that goddamned store and the Jewel with it could suck my balls, because I’ve gotten whiplash one too many times from trying to take a cart 10 feet too far within one single parking lot!!! Grr…
I shop in Irving Park now. So maybe they’ve fixed it. But I still hate them, just on principle.
Are there really places that don’t have the quarter corralsat any of their stores yet? I resisted at first, but really, the pros far outweigh the cons.
I always thought this was universal - we had it in Western Canada back in the 80s (or possibly early 90s). But spent some time in Eastern Canada and never once saw a loonie corral there, and when I tried to explain it to people it was clear that most had never heard of such a thing. The thing is, I shopped at the same chain in both places (Real Canadian/Atlantic Superstore). So what gives? Do the different branches of the company not talk to each other?
I guess the problem would be that a quarter or dollar isn’t enough. To be effective, it would have to be high enough to be worth somebody’s time to push an empty cart all the way back after it’s traveled. I’m thinking $20 should do it. You’d have to keep all the carts in a big enclosure, and keep an employee on full-time duty to collect the money for outgoing carts and return it for incoming, but the need for the retrieval service (in-house or contracted) should disappear. Staffing the system full-time also means you don’t have to pay for gizmos.
The £1 trolleys are common in most of the supermarkets round my area- though I did notice one little store on a windy day recently who really haven’t got the hang of it- they had a line of ten or so trolleys all chained up together, but hadn’t attached them to anything. The whole lot caught the wind, and were merrily rolling out into the busy street…
Fortunately, the guy walking in front of me had good reflexes, and prevented a pile-up.
The jammer mechanism ones are also occasionally found, but they do seem prone to jamming permanently- the local supermarket just switched from them to the coin ones, probably because they got sick of fixing them- quite a few people seem to think a trolley is worth paying £1 for though, I noticed a few on my street within a week of them switching.
They have the $1/$2 deposit system in basically every major supermarket in my area. In theory, it’s a fine idea. In practise, here’s how they’ve fucked it up.
They have big carts. They have small carts (same width, but the bottom is raised to make it easier to take out your groceries if you’re only getting half a cart’s worth). And, some supermarkets which have been doing this a while they’ve got “old style” and “new style” (ie, they got a new round of carts every decade or so, and the latest batch is from a different manufacturer or something)
The “old style” don’t push into the “new style”. The “new style” don’t fit into the “old style”. The half-size fit into both of the big sorts, but of course not the other way round. But all the locking mechanisms are interchangeable.
So half the time I push my big cart over to the trolley return lines only to find that Every. Single. Line. has been finished off by someone merrily pushing their half-size trolley into it, oblivious to the fact that it is now completely useless to the big-trolley users who are the majority of customers, because the latches are on chains 5cm long which simply won’t reach to the next mechanism unless you can push your trolley right in.
I pretty much regard it as a $1 tax on my shopping these days. And I’m sure someone is happy to find my unlocked trolley sadly loitering round the trolley lines, so at least I’m doing someone some good.
This. At my local store they have like 8 different cart sizes – at least 3 of them have cabs attached to stick kids into, making them in human-powered buses about 10 feet long.
Who can blame the homeless though? They have enough problems and I wouldn’t expect them to care about stealing a cart to store all their worldly possessions in. What else are they supposed to do?
The assholes in my building are another story. We live next door to some stores and they always take the carts and just leave them in the hallway. They probably go and get another cart the next time instead of pushing that one back when they go back to the store a few days later and last trip’s cart is still sitting in the hall. The one time I took a cart up to my apartment, I put my groceries away and then immediately returned it.
