Shopping cart abandonment a big problem for some local businesses

George Mathewson You’ve seen them scattered around town, stray shopping carts parked in corners and side streets or rolled into a ditch.

George Mathewson

You’ve seen them scattered around town, stray shopping carts parked in corners and side streets or rolled into a ditch.

Shopping cart abandonment is a large and perennial problem for Sarnia businesses, though store operators don’t like to discuss it on the record.

Typically, a shopper will remove a cart from a store’s parking lot without permission and use it to trundle home groceries and other items. Seldom are they returned.

A single cart costs $75 to $150, depending on materials used and the quantity purchased, so the financial impact is substantial.

Cart loss is in the millions of dollars annually in Canada, which is passed on to customers in the form of higher prices.

To lessen the impact, some Sarnia grocery stores hire people to head outside and retrieve their shopping carts from the parking lot.

Others provide carts with a locking mechanism in the handle. The device encourages customers to return the cart for a coin deposit or personal key.

And at least one entrepreneur in town has created a business out of retrieving shopping carts. He and a partner patrol the city to locate the wayward buggies, which are loaded on a trailer and returned to their rightful owners.

Inventors in the U.S. have come up with novel ways to thwart would-be thieves.

They include buggies with wheels that lock when the cart leaves the perimeter of the parking lot, locks that are activated via magnetic levers or radio frequencies and sometimes trip wires buried in the asphalt, all with varying degrees of success.