Grocery Cart Theft

[lamb]

Even newer on the grocery cart front

Talking Carts

"Lamb, your milk has expired - time to purchase a new quart"

No thanks.

[hillbill]

I have an absolutely exciting report from the field. It appears that the supermarkets near me are abandoning the quarter-in-the-slot thingy and also not implementing the electronic dog collar wheel.

At a newer Waldbaum's:

Steel mesh with no quarter thingy.

At Shoprite:

Older carts; metal with quarter thingy.

Newer carts; plastic with no quarter thingy.

Most exciting observation: Spotted Dick in a can in the international aisle.

Oh, and Eight O'Clock coffee on sale for $1.99. Just about the only bargain in Waldbaum's.

[tommy]

Apparently, this works the same way the fenceless dog gating systems work: when the cart is taken beyond an electronic "border", one of the front wheels locks up.

oddly enough, a good percentage of the carts that i pull out of the cart conga line have 1 or 2 wheels locked up already.

Edited November 3, 2003 by tommy (log)

[Pan]

I looked at the link and still don't know what spotted dick is.

[hillbill]

I looked at the link and still don't know what spotted dick is.

Nor do I! But that's what the can looks like (best picture I could find with a quick google.)

[Dave the Cook]

Put a Spotted Dick on your table tonight.

[Pan]

Looks good. Thanks, Dave.

[hillbill]

Shopping around for the perfect cart

Last November, Key Food equipped its 150 carts with a high-tech, anti-theft device called CAPS, short for Cart Anti-Theft Protection System, produced by Cartronics, based in San Diego....

....."We lost three carts, which cost about $75 each -- $125 with the lock," he said, "which is not bad for a year."

....Western Beef, a 25-store Queens-based chain, a cart corral is looking better than the system installed two years ago ...

....carts equipped with Gatekeeper, an anti-theft device that works with a front wheel that locks....

......"People would drag them with the wheels locked. We would find the carts four or five blocks away with the wheels worn out," he said. ....

....."We'd lose the carts, which cost about $90, $180 with the anti-theft device, .....

... The battery on the wheel is not rechargeable, and probably needs replacement within two years; at 300 wheels, that's $16,000 every two years. 

The Kart Saver system is installed at about a dozen Best Buy stores across the country, including Richmond Avenue, New Springville.

Instead of a perimeter wire buried beneath the parking lot, Kart Saver works on infrared rays....

[Placebo]

My neighborhood tends to be strewn with shopping carts. It's pretty hilly so I guess people just don't like carrying their groceries home. When I was unemployed a couple of years ago I thought about taking my copious spare time and using it for something extraordinarily pointless - namely tagging and tracking the migration patterns of the local shopping cart population. The idea was to go very Marlin Perkins Wild Kingdom with it - tag each cart I find, determine it's store of origin and then note each time I ran into it again (they do seem to have migratory patterns around the neighborhood at times). I thought about videotaping the "capture," tagging and release of a couple carts as well. I wound up getting ajob instead. Perhaps som eother time as the stores around here don't appear to have implemented any hobbling of thweir carts yet (apart from Uwajimaya, the Japanese super store).

This is what happens when I have too much free time on my hands.