Abandoned shopping carts cost taxpayers thousands of dollars
NY
CNN
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Santa Fe, New Mexico, paid a local contractor $47,000 to assemble about 3,000 shopping carts in the city in 2021 and 2022.
Fayetteville, North Carolina, spent $78,468 picking up cars from May 2020 to October 2022.
Shopping carts continue to drift away from their stores, emptying taxpayers’ coffers, causing trouble and frustrating local officials and retailers.
Abandoned shopping carts are a scourge for neighborhoods, as stray carts block intersections, sidewalks, and bus stops. They take up handicapped spots in parking lots and end up in creeks, ditches, and parks. And clog municipal sewer and sewer systems and cause accidents.
There is no national data on shopping cart losses, but US retailers lose a few tens of millions of dollars each year replacing lost or damaged carts, shopping cart experts say. They pay vendors to salvage lost carts and pay fines to municipalities for violating shopping cart laws. They also lose sales if there aren’t enough carts for customers during peak shopping hours.
Last year, Walmart paid $23,000 in fines related to abandoned shopping carts in the small town of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, said Shawn McDonald, a member of the city’s Select Board.
Dartmouth public workers spent two years rounding up more than 100 Walmart carts scattered around the city and housed them in one of the city’s storage facilities. When Walmart applied for a new building permit, the company was told it had to pay the town thousands of dollars in daily storage fees, McDonald said.
“It’s a safety issue with these cars coming down the hill. I had one that got left on the road while I was driving,” she said. “It got to the point where I got mad.”
More municipalities across the country they are proposing laws that crack down on lost cars. They are imposing fines on retailers for abandoned carts and fees for recovery services, as well as mandates for stores to block their carts or install systems to contain them. Some localities are also fining people who remove carts from stores.
The Ogden, Utah, city council passed an ordinance this month that fines people who take or are in possession of a store cart. The measure also authorizes the city to charge retailers a $2 per day storage and handling fee to recover lost carts.
“Abandoned shopping carts have become a growing nuisance on public and private property throughout the city,” the council said. saying in your summary of the bill. City officials “are spending a considerable amount of time picking up and returning or disposing of the cars.”
Matthew Dodson, president of Retail Marketing Services, which provides cart recovery, maintenance and other services to leading retailers in several western states, said lost shopping carts are a growing problem.
During the busy 2022 holiday season, Retail Marketing Service leased additional carts to retailers and recovered 91% of its approximately 2,000 carts, up from 96% the year before.
Dodson and others in the shopping cart industry say the increase in lost carts can be attributed to several factors, including homeless people using them to store their belongings or as a shelter. Homelessness has been on the rise in many major cities due to skyrocketing home prices, lack of affordable housingand other factors. There have also been incidents of people steal cars for scrap.
Some people, especially in cities, also use grocery carts to bring their purchases home from the store. Other cars drive away from the parking lots if they are not closed during bad weather or overnight.
Undoubtedly, the problem of wayward shopping carts It’s not new. They started leaving stores soon after their introduction in the late 1930s.
“A new threat threatens the safety of motorists in stores,” the New York Times warned in a 1962 article. Article. “It’s the shopping cart.” Another New York Times article in 1957 called the trend “Cart-Nap.”
There’s even a book, “Lost Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification,” dedicated to the phenomenon and an identification system for lost shopping carts, much like guides to birding.
Edward Tenner, a distinguished scholar at the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, said the misuse of everyday items like shopping carts is an example of “deviant wit.”
It is similar to talapia fishermen in Malaysia. steal public phones in the 1990s and connecting the receivers to powerful batteries that made a sound to attract fish, he said.
Tenner hypothesized that people grab shopping carts from stores because they’re extremely versatile and not available elsewhere: “There’s really no legitimate way for a person to buy a supermarket-quality shopping cart.”
Supermarkets may have 200 to 300 shopping carts per store, while large chains have as many as 800. Depending on size and model, carts cost as much as $250, said Alex Poulos, director of sales for RW Rogers Company, which supplies carts and other equipment to stores.
Over the years, stores and cart manufacturers have increased cart sizes to encourage shoppers to buy more items.
Stores have introduced various security and cart theft prevention measures over the years, such as cart corrals and, more recently, wheels that automatically lock if a cart strays too far from the store. (Viral videos on TikTok showing Target customers struggling to push carts with wheel locks).
Gatekeeper Systems, which provides shopping cart control measures for the nation’s largest retailers, said demand for its “SmartWheel” radio frequency locks has increased during the pandemic.
A four storesWegmans is using the Gatekeeper wheel locks.
“The cost of replacing carts, as well as the cost of locating and returning lost carts to the store, led us to the decision to implement the technology,” a Wegmans spokesperson said.
Aldi, the German supermarket chain which is expanding rapidly in the United States, it is one of the few American retailers that requires customers to deposit a quarter to unlock a cart.
Coin-operated shopping cart systems are popular in Europe, and Poulos said more US companies are requesting coin-operated systems in response to out-of-control shopping cart costs.