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What makes this such a localised phenomenon? Locking shopping cart wheels just aren't a thing here in the Netherlands (or neighbouring countries). It used to be

What makes this such a localised phenomenon? Locking shopping cart wheels just aren't a thing here in the Netherlands (or neighbouring countries). It used to be that most required a €1 coin inserted to unlock its link tethering it to the next car in the row, but then covid happened and a lot of shops simply disabled those locks and concluded that the system worked better without — probably driven in part by an increasing number of people who don't carry any cash. Losing a cart is expensive, but it doesn't seem to happen at the scale that would make a full blown locking wheel solution cost effective.

isoprophlex 1y ago
There used to be a supermarket that had these near my student housing complex in Utrecht (the Netherlands). Only place I ever encountered them. This was 20 years ago tho. It was completely counterproductive, too. The edge of the zone was about 50% of the way home. Out of spite, we'd push the cart up to the edge, and leave it stranded there, carrying everything the last 200m ourselves. Not proud of that in retrospect; it goes to show that you can't stop assholes with technology.
ars 1y ago
It's most common in places with lots of elderly or homeless, both groups find these carts very useful and will simply take them, homeless to keep, elderly to abandon near their home once they have transported their groceries. It's more also common in places where people walk, since it can be hard to bring groceries home on public transport. So yes, very localized. The shop near me doesn't have locking wheels (they used to, but stopped), instead they have a guy in a pickup that drives around occasionally, searching for carts.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  I understand about homeless people but elderly? Don't they have personnal shopping trolley? Like those with 3 wheels to be able to go climb curbs and small stairs? Regular carts are only used inside or by people who need to bring their stuff to their car and a pain in the ass to operate in the streets as they don't climb curbs easily. Locally all supermarkets actually have locks at the entrace so that people can lock their shopping trolleys next to the cashiers.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > Regular carts are only used inside or by people who need to bring their stuff to their car and a pain in the ass to operate in the streets as they don't climb curbs easily. Curbs have onramps. Pretty much every corner and every driveway provides a ramp where wheeled vehicles can easily get on to the sidewalk. You will never have any difficulty pushing a shopping cart onto a sidewalk. https://sdotblog.seattle.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/image-5.jpeg https://sdotblog.seattle.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/202...
    - prmoustache 1y ago
      That is a US thing. While things are improving in europe, many sidewalks still have a tiny step. Not high enough to be a problem for someone in a wheelchair but definitely for a loaded cart with shitty plastic wheels. Also it is not uncommon to have people parking where they shouldn't so you can't rely on it. In many part of the world people living in a wheelchair tend to spend a significant amount of time in the street instead of the sidewalk because of "stuff" that block their way on a regular basis.
      - kube-system 1y ago
        Thank you ADA. One of the great progressive legal breakthroughs in the US. Maybe one day we can have a legal environment where we can make progress like that again.
        fortran77 1y ago
        > One of the great progressive legal breakthroughs in the US. Maybe one day we can have a legal environment where we can make progress like that again. It was signed into law in on July 26, 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. I hope you get to see a progressive man like George H.W. Bush in the White House again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...
        1y ago
unwind 1y ago
Larger stores in Sweden also use the coin system, even though as in the Netherlands it feels like use is declining in favor of just unlocked carts. My favorite part of the system in larger stores is that to handle people not carrying cash (Sweden is pretty long-gone in this regard), you can usually go inside the store to get a free plastic token that fits the reader. That always made me chuckle, since the entire point of the system is that you're supposed to be incentivized to return the cart to get your money back, so by replacing your money with a free plastic token that they hand out from a basket, they did .. something to the overall system design. Still fun as an example of how the customer's overall experience is more important than the point of an entire security system, I think.
- Ghoelian 1y ago
  > That always made me chuckle, since the entire point of the system is that you're supposed to be incentivized to return the cart to get your money back I always kinda doubted that part, or at least its effectiveness. Iirc a 50 eurocent coin will unlock most trolleys, which is pretty cheap for a whole ass trolley. And sure enough, there's a lot of elderly people that just have a shopping trolley in their yard or something. This morning I found one randomly in our bike shed.
  - ljf 1y ago
    This brought back a memory of living in Byron Bay Australia in 1999 - there was a person who’s full time job was driving around town with a trailer, collecting shopping trolleys and returning them to the Woolworths supermarket. I’d never seen that in the uk - but maybe that town was the sweet spot in size where it was small enough that you could actually get home with a trolley (and it was nice and flat), and maybe the number of visitors passing through meant rules got broken more - though the trolleys were more in the suburban areas than just where the hostels were.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - Moru 1y ago
jansper39 1y ago
The coin insert system is to incentivise people to return the trolley though not to prevent thefts.
- account42 1y ago
  You're implying that shopping cart theft means people taking the cart to use it for something when it largely is people taking it off store for convenience and not returning it. The coin very much deters that kind of theft.
eloisant 1y ago
When I was a kid we didn't have this coin thing in supermarkets in France, and the problem wasn't people stealing carts (which they could do for for €1 anyway) but many people were leaving them at random places in the parking lot, basically near where they were parked. That made driving in the parking around the carts a big mess.
yapyap 1y ago
€0,50 actually
tyingq 1y ago
Homelessness in the US. They steal carts to carry their stuff around, or to collect trash aluminum cans to earn money, etc. In certain areas, it's pretty common and probably crosses the cost:benefit line for stores.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Yeah a cart costs a couple of hundred dollars for the store to replace, they don't want to lose too many of them.
xattt 1y ago
One reason, beyond cart theft, is aesthetics. A grocery store at Bayview Village, an upscale mall in Toronto, uses this system to stop cart travel outside the grocery store parking garage. Mall management considers carts trashy and that they otherwise bring down the appearance of the mall. This was one of the conditions when the store opened in 2005. Their cart policy may have changed 20 years since.
- waterproof 1y ago
  Right, the real reason isn't to stop theft, it's to avoid the optics of store-branded carts being left around and save management the hassle of retrieving carts from nearby properties.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    I provide a counter-example. In the city I live in, there is only one regional grocery chain, and they always have a bagger push your cart to your car for you. Was sort of annoying when I moved here 15 years ago. The parking lot has no corrals for carts, because the bagger always takes the empty cart back. These carts have, for the last couple years (I don't remember when, exactly), the locks on the front left wheel. It can't be to "disable the carts if someone tries to take them out of the parking lot". That isn't an issue. Though I have not seen it in action, I suspect that if I tried to take a cart through the exit without somehow moving it past whatever device deactivates the lock would have the cart lock up and start skidding (though with the lock being on the front, anyone should be able to just pop a wheely with their body weight and keep on trucking). That said, I don't claim that these are effective at loss-prevention, but sometimes those jackasses get crazy ideas in their heads and won't be dissuaded by common sense and reality and all those other naive things.
    - themadturk 1y ago
      I frequently get so much in a grocery trip that even my body weight wouldn't be enough for a wheelie...
rzwitserloot 1y ago
For context, in The Netherlands, supermarkets are in urban areas and have no parking lot at all or a relatively tiny one. The usual USian aspect of schlepping a shopping cart waay out to your car and then not wanting to schlep it back or to one of those bays is thus far less relevant. Also, buying all groceries for the next week is rare here. In other words, you just pack your stuff in bags and walk off, no need to bring the shopping cart. It's a somewhat unique situation (in NL it is not legal to have a store open to the general public except in a commercial zone, i.e. a supermarket cannot open its business in an industrial zone which means the stores kinda have to be in the middle of population centers, which then opens the door to just buying what you need every day. This then in turn means you can go by bicycle and you don't need a massive freezer either). Interesting how such a relatively innocuous butterfly flap (the zoning laws) result in such an utter change in culture (bicycle, urbanisation, shop-for-the-day instead of for-the-week, etc).
- Aaargh20318 1y ago
  > just buying what you need every day Not just for the whole day, I ofter make a trip in the morning for breakfast/lunch and another in the evening to get whatever I need for dinner.
gield 1y ago
>in the Netherlands (or neighbouring countries) Most supermarkets in Belgium use a coin but some supermarkets (notably Colruyt) lock their shopping cart wheels. Supermarkets that have a step-less escalator (e.g. to go to the parking lot in the basement) also use these locking wheels to make sure the cart never moves on the escalator. I live near an Albert Heijn that has these.
- Aaargh20318 1y ago
  > Supermarkets that have a step-less escalator (e.g. to go to the parking lot in the basement) also use these locking wheels to make sure the cart never moves on the escalator. we have a Jumbo near here that is below a parking garage and they have something similar, but it's an entirely passive system. The sloped movable walkway to the parking garage floor has this grooved pattern in it's surface anyway (so you don't slip) and the wheels have a similar pattern so they just sink into the grooves on the walkway. There's a brake pad next to each wheel just above the floor and as the wheel sinks into the grooves the brake pad touches the walkway locking it in place. At the beginning/end of the walkway there are these sloped protrusion into the grooves on the walkway that lift the cart out of the grooves as it reaches the end. No fancy locking system needed.
snickerdoodle12 1y ago
I've seen it in the netherlands as well in poorer areas
whynotmaybe 1y ago
In Canada, I had one that locked itself when I left the shop as soon as I entered it, because I realized I forgot my wallet. I went through the main gate but left without going through the cash registers. I guess it detected it and thought I was stealing.
bobsmooth 1y ago
You live in a high trust society.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
>Am I going to need to just start sharing my Claude chat history to prove to people In the United States, this is for shoplifting (can you call it shoplifting if they're sprinting to the door pushing a full cart?). If the cart doesn't pass through a checkout lane, the wheel becomes disabled. The local grocery chain here has them, and it's never been deposit-for-a-cart. I honestly do not know if the shoplifting thing was ever a real problem, or just an imaginary one that they paid a bunch of money to "solve". Occasionally, there are a few carts in the corral where the wheel in question will not roll anymore, and you have to take a new one.
- dsclough 1y ago
  Every time I’ve encountered this in Texas it is at the perimeter of the stores parking lot such that if you park in some of the furthest parking spaces your cart will be locked up when you try to return it to the corral. I’ve always assumed it is to prevent literally stealing the carts themselves moreso than shoplifters trying to shoplift entire cartloads of stuff.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    I confess to being in Texas. But in this city, the bagger always pushes the cart, and returns it to the store. They don't even have cart corrals in the parking lot because this is how they expect it to work. Maybe for other stores it is some sort of cart management solution, but where I am I can imagine no other possible purpose than (ineffective) loss prevention.
    - vel0city 1y ago
      I remember this being a thing a long time ago, baggers at grocery stores often helping wheel out the cart and load the car. It's very rare around where I'm at these days it seems. It's now even rare for the full service checkout lanes to have dedicated baggers, they're often having to hop between the few open lanes.
SoftTalker 1y ago
Aldi in the USA uses a coin system on their carts, you insert a quarter to unlock the chain. It's not so much about theft, if someone wanted a cart, a quarter is a cheap price to pay. They do it so that people bring the carts back to the corral at the front of the store to get their quarter back, instead of leaving them in the parking area. That way, the store doesn't need to hire someone to go out and gather the carts every 15 minutes. In my view it's quite an inconvenience: who carries quarters around anymore? I rarely have any cash with me, let alone loose change. I expect we'll soon see something where you make a small payment with your card or mobile pay app which is rebated when you return the cart.
- rtkwe 1y ago
  Don't even fully push the transaction through, that'd cost money on both the charge and the refund (and maybe get you in trouble with the card company because they don't like processing lots of refunds), just preauthorize/hold the deposit on the card and cancel that if the cart is returned.
- rockfishroll 1y ago
  I think this solution also misses the fact that certain kinds of people (like bored kids) will walk through fire for a free quarter. It's not even the money, it's the novelty. So if you have a population of people who consider the charge 'the cost of shopping' and don't care enough about 25 cents to return the cart, you still have a whole other population of people who will hunt them down and return them for those people. As a kid, I almost missed a flight while hunting luggage carts at the airport.
  - EvanAnderson 1y ago
    > I think this solution also misses the fact that certain kinds of people (like bored kids) will walk through fire for a free quarter. This. Soda bottle deposits when I was a kid. (Heck, even now. Who am I kidding? My state doesn't have them anymore, but I still vacation in places that do, and I still keep an eye out for bottles and cans.)
tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
The shopping cart locking-if-it-leaves-the-parking-lot feature is a thing in Germany (not universally, but I've seen it e.g. at ALDI).
andrepd 1y ago
The big supermarket in my town does it, but that's because students stole the shopping carts to carry booze during the year-end party and parade!
andrepd 1y ago
In the Netherlands most people shop at a small store, not at a big box surrounded by a sea of parking. So no shopping carts there.
schwartzworld 1y ago
Using a 1 pound coin is basically saying “it costs a pound to take this and not bring it back.” It works for lazy returners, but makes blatant theft quite easy.
wcunning 1y ago
Student housing near the engineering campus at University of Michigan is about 1/2 mile away from the reasonably close Kroger grocery store. When I started there in 2009, the carts didn't have the locking wheels and many people would take the cart all the way back to their apartment complex -- this meant that the Kroger store manager had to rent a moving van every so often and go collect them all as the carts cost $500~1000 new, so replacing them when they're 1/2 mile to a mile away wasn't good economics. Eventually this got so bad (never a cart at the store when you wanted one, had to go get them all the time) that they switched to the geolocking wheels, which was a pain because the geolock frequently false detected if you were at the back of the annoyingly small parking lot, so there were always carts stuck in the back ~20 spots. Later, my girlfriend told me that the specialty foreign foods store near the Big Lots she worked at in a different Detroit suburb would intentionally come steal the Big Lots carts, rather than pay for their own (see above, expensive), so the Big Lots clerks would occasionally get sent on a mission with a moving van to get a bunch of their carts from the next shopping center over's parking lot. I think they might not have ever paid for the geolocking wheels, since Big Lots is low margin and those options are pretty expensive, but you can see the incentive to do so.
- account42 1y ago
  Was prosecuting the thieves ever considered? It wouldn't even have to involve law enforcement in this case but could be handled through the university. Sometimes even a little bit of deterrence is much more effective than a mountain of technical solutions.
- stavros 1y ago
  I've seen carts with stacks of disks for wheels (with gaps between them). The parking lot edges have grates that are the width of the disks, so if you push a cart over this, it'll fall in and stop moving. You have to pick it up and carry it out, which might be enough of a roadblock to deter some casual theft.
munificent 1y ago
Probably a combination of: * In a high-trust high social cohesion culture, you can rely on people returning carts all the way to where they belong instead of just selfishly leaving them in the parking lot once they are done with it. * In the US, the opioid epidemic means there are many more homeless drug addicts. Stolen shopping carts are useful for them to move their stuff around.
Terretta 1y ago
Localized to where? They are at every Aldi in Tenerife...
magicmicah85 1y ago
https://ourworldindata.org/trust https://ourworldindata.org/trust Some of us live in a low trust society. But this is such a cool talk. My local Giant (grocery store) has a wire that goes along the left side of their parking lot. Only about 20 spots there but once you cross that line, the wheel locks. It took me 2-3 trips of confusion why the cart was breaking before a store employee shouted at me "you're gonna lock it" right as I crossed the line. He came out to me, unlocked it and we had a long talk about how it all works.
mgarciaisaia 1y ago
https://www.tiktok.com/@canal26argentina/video/7169586172967079173 https://www.tiktok.com/@canal26argentina/video/7169586172967... Argentinian fans during Qatar's FIFA World Cup 2022 using a shopping cart as a barbequeue grill. A friend of mine had stolen one with his brothers back when we were in primary school. But stores here simply have a guard on their parking lots to prevent people from taking the carts away - haven't seen any tech for that.
art0rz 1y ago
I'm from The Netherlands and I've seen carts with locking wheels. Granted it's very rare, but definitely a thing. I've lived in the US as well and have never seen them there, but it's a big country.

isoprophlex 1y ago

There used to be a supermarket that had these near my student housing complex in Utrecht (the Netherlands). Only place I ever encountered them. This was 20 years ago tho. It was completely counterproductive, too. The edge of the zone was about 50% of the way home. Out of spite, we'd push the cart up to the edge, and leave it stranded there, carrying everything the last 200m ourselves. Not proud of that in retrospect; it goes to show that you can't stop assholes with technology.

ars 1y ago

It's most common in places with lots of elderly or homeless, both groups find these carts very useful and will simply take them, homeless to keep, elderly to abandon near their home once they have transported their groceries. It's more also common in places where people walk, since it can be hard to bring groceries home on public transport. So yes, very localized. The shop near me doesn't have locking wheels (they used to, but stopped), instead they have a guy in a pickup that drives around occasionally, searching for carts.

prmoustache 1y ago
I understand about homeless people but elderly? Don't they have personnal shopping trolley? Like those with 3 wheels to be able to go climb curbs and small stairs? Regular carts are only used inside or by people who need to bring their stuff to their car and a pain in the ass to operate in the streets as they don't climb curbs easily. Locally all supermarkets actually have locks at the entrace so that people can lock their shopping trolleys next to the cashiers.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > Regular carts are only used inside or by people who need to bring their stuff to their car and a pain in the ass to operate in the streets as they don't climb curbs easily. Curbs have onramps. Pretty much every corner and every driveway provides a ramp where wheeled vehicles can easily get on to the sidewalk. You will never have any difficulty pushing a shopping cart onto a sidewalk. https://sdotblog.seattle.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/image-5.jpeg https://sdotblog.seattle.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/202...
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    That is a US thing. While things are improving in europe, many sidewalks still have a tiny step. Not high enough to be a problem for someone in a wheelchair but definitely for a loaded cart with shitty plastic wheels. Also it is not uncommon to have people parking where they shouldn't so you can't rely on it. In many part of the world people living in a wheelchair tend to spend a significant amount of time in the street instead of the sidewalk because of "stuff" that block their way on a regular basis.
    - kube-system 1y ago
      Thank you ADA. One of the great progressive legal breakthroughs in the US. Maybe one day we can have a legal environment where we can make progress like that again.
      - fortran77 1y ago
        > One of the great progressive legal breakthroughs in the US. Maybe one day we can have a legal environment where we can make progress like that again. It was signed into law in on July 26, 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. I hope you get to see a progressive man like George H.W. Bush in the White House again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...
        1y ago

unwind 1y ago

Larger stores in Sweden also use the coin system, even though as in the Netherlands it feels like use is declining in favor of just unlocked carts. My favorite part of the system in larger stores is that to handle people not carrying cash (Sweden is pretty long-gone in this regard), you can usually go inside the store to get a free plastic token that fits the reader. That always made me chuckle, since the entire point of the system is that you're supposed to be incentivized to return the cart to get your money back, so by replacing your money with a free plastic token that they hand out from a basket, they did .. something to the overall system design. Still fun as an example of how the customer's overall experience is more important than the point of an entire security system, I think.

Ghoelian 1y ago
> That always made me chuckle, since the entire point of the system is that you're supposed to be incentivized to return the cart to get your money back I always kinda doubted that part, or at least its effectiveness. Iirc a 50 eurocent coin will unlock most trolleys, which is pretty cheap for a whole ass trolley. And sure enough, there's a lot of elderly people that just have a shopping trolley in their yard or something. This morning I found one randomly in our bike shed.
- ljf 1y ago
  This brought back a memory of living in Byron Bay Australia in 1999 - there was a person who’s full time job was driving around town with a trailer, collecting shopping trolleys and returning them to the Woolworths supermarket. I’d never seen that in the uk - but maybe that town was the sweet spot in size where it was small enough that you could actually get home with a trolley (and it was nice and flat), and maybe the number of visitors passing through meant rules got broken more - though the trolleys were more in the suburban areas than just where the hostels were.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Moru 1y ago

jansper39 1y ago

The coin insert system is to incentivise people to return the trolley though not to prevent thefts.

account42 1y ago
You're implying that shopping cart theft means people taking the cart to use it for something when it largely is people taking it off store for convenience and not returning it. The coin very much deters that kind of theft.

eloisant 1y ago

When I was a kid we didn't have this coin thing in supermarkets in France, and the problem wasn't people stealing carts (which they could do for for €1 anyway) but many people were leaving them at random places in the parking lot, basically near where they were parked. That made driving in the parking around the carts a big mess.

yapyap 1y ago

€0,50 actually

tyingq 1y ago

Homelessness in the US. They steal carts to carry their stuff around, or to collect trash aluminum cans to earn money, etc. In certain areas, it's pretty common and probably crosses the cost:benefit line for stores.

SoftTalker 1y ago
Yeah a cart costs a couple of hundred dollars for the store to replace, they don't want to lose too many of them.

xattt 1y ago

One reason, beyond cart theft, is aesthetics. A grocery store at Bayview Village, an upscale mall in Toronto, uses this system to stop cart travel outside the grocery store parking garage. Mall management considers carts trashy and that they otherwise bring down the appearance of the mall. This was one of the conditions when the store opened in 2005. Their cart policy may have changed 20 years since.

waterproof 1y ago
Right, the real reason isn't to stop theft, it's to avoid the optics of store-branded carts being left around and save management the hassle of retrieving carts from nearby properties.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  I provide a counter-example. In the city I live in, there is only one regional grocery chain, and they always have a bagger push your cart to your car for you. Was sort of annoying when I moved here 15 years ago. The parking lot has no corrals for carts, because the bagger always takes the empty cart back. These carts have, for the last couple years (I don't remember when, exactly), the locks on the front left wheel. It can't be to "disable the carts if someone tries to take them out of the parking lot". That isn't an issue. Though I have not seen it in action, I suspect that if I tried to take a cart through the exit without somehow moving it past whatever device deactivates the lock would have the cart lock up and start skidding (though with the lock being on the front, anyone should be able to just pop a wheely with their body weight and keep on trucking). That said, I don't claim that these are effective at loss-prevention, but sometimes those jackasses get crazy ideas in their heads and won't be dissuaded by common sense and reality and all those other naive things.
  - themadturk 1y ago
    I frequently get so much in a grocery trip that even my body weight wouldn't be enough for a wheelie...

rzwitserloot 1y ago

For context, in The Netherlands, supermarkets are in urban areas and have no parking lot at all or a relatively tiny one. The usual USian aspect of schlepping a shopping cart waay out to your car and then not wanting to schlep it back or to one of those bays is thus far less relevant. Also, buying all groceries for the next week is rare here. In other words, you just pack your stuff in bags and walk off, no need to bring the shopping cart. It's a somewhat unique situation (in NL it is not legal to have a store open to the general public except in a commercial zone, i.e. a supermarket cannot open its business in an industrial zone which means the stores kinda have to be in the middle of population centers, which then opens the door to just buying what you need every day. This then in turn means you can go by bicycle and you don't need a massive freezer either). Interesting how such a relatively innocuous butterfly flap (the zoning laws) result in such an utter change in culture (bicycle, urbanisation, shop-for-the-day instead of for-the-week, etc).

Aaargh20318 1y ago
> just buying what you need every day Not just for the whole day, I ofter make a trip in the morning for breakfast/lunch and another in the evening to get whatever I need for dinner.

gield 1y ago

>in the Netherlands (or neighbouring countries) Most supermarkets in Belgium use a coin but some supermarkets (notably Colruyt) lock their shopping cart wheels. Supermarkets that have a step-less escalator (e.g. to go to the parking lot in the basement) also use these locking wheels to make sure the cart never moves on the escalator. I live near an Albert Heijn that has these.

Aaargh20318 1y ago
> Supermarkets that have a step-less escalator (e.g. to go to the parking lot in the basement) also use these locking wheels to make sure the cart never moves on the escalator. we have a Jumbo near here that is below a parking garage and they have something similar, but it's an entirely passive system. The sloped movable walkway to the parking garage floor has this grooved pattern in it's surface anyway (so you don't slip) and the wheels have a similar pattern so they just sink into the grooves on the walkway. There's a brake pad next to each wheel just above the floor and as the wheel sinks into the grooves the brake pad touches the walkway locking it in place. At the beginning/end of the walkway there are these sloped protrusion into the grooves on the walkway that lift the cart out of the grooves as it reaches the end. No fancy locking system needed.

snickerdoodle12 1y ago

I've seen it in the netherlands as well in poorer areas

whynotmaybe 1y ago

In Canada, I had one that locked itself when I left the shop as soon as I entered it, because I realized I forgot my wallet. I went through the main gate but left without going through the cash registers. I guess it detected it and thought I was stealing.

bobsmooth 1y ago

You live in a high trust society.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago

>Am I going to need to just start sharing my Claude chat history to prove to people In the United States, this is for shoplifting (can you call it shoplifting if they're sprinting to the door pushing a full cart?). If the cart doesn't pass through a checkout lane, the wheel becomes disabled. The local grocery chain here has them, and it's never been deposit-for-a-cart. I honestly do not know if the shoplifting thing was ever a real problem, or just an imaginary one that they paid a bunch of money to "solve". Occasionally, there are a few carts in the corral where the wheel in question will not roll anymore, and you have to take a new one.

dsclough 1y ago
Every time I’ve encountered this in Texas it is at the perimeter of the stores parking lot such that if you park in some of the furthest parking spaces your cart will be locked up when you try to return it to the corral. I’ve always assumed it is to prevent literally stealing the carts themselves moreso than shoplifters trying to shoplift entire cartloads of stuff.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  I confess to being in Texas. But in this city, the bagger always pushes the cart, and returns it to the store. They don't even have cart corrals in the parking lot because this is how they expect it to work. Maybe for other stores it is some sort of cart management solution, but where I am I can imagine no other possible purpose than (ineffective) loss prevention.
  - vel0city 1y ago
    I remember this being a thing a long time ago, baggers at grocery stores often helping wheel out the cart and load the car. It's very rare around where I'm at these days it seems. It's now even rare for the full service checkout lanes to have dedicated baggers, they're often having to hop between the few open lanes.

SoftTalker 1y ago

Aldi in the USA uses a coin system on their carts, you insert a quarter to unlock the chain. It's not so much about theft, if someone wanted a cart, a quarter is a cheap price to pay. They do it so that people bring the carts back to the corral at the front of the store to get their quarter back, instead of leaving them in the parking area. That way, the store doesn't need to hire someone to go out and gather the carts every 15 minutes. In my view it's quite an inconvenience: who carries quarters around anymore? I rarely have any cash with me, let alone loose change. I expect we'll soon see something where you make a small payment with your card or mobile pay app which is rebated when you return the cart.

rtkwe 1y ago
Don't even fully push the transaction through, that'd cost money on both the charge and the refund (and maybe get you in trouble with the card company because they don't like processing lots of refunds), just preauthorize/hold the deposit on the card and cancel that if the cart is returned.
rockfishroll 1y ago
I think this solution also misses the fact that certain kinds of people (like bored kids) will walk through fire for a free quarter. It's not even the money, it's the novelty. So if you have a population of people who consider the charge 'the cost of shopping' and don't care enough about 25 cents to return the cart, you still have a whole other population of people who will hunt them down and return them for those people. As a kid, I almost missed a flight while hunting luggage carts at the airport.
- EvanAnderson 1y ago
  > I think this solution also misses the fact that certain kinds of people (like bored kids) will walk through fire for a free quarter. This. Soda bottle deposits when I was a kid. (Heck, even now. Who am I kidding? My state doesn't have them anymore, but I still vacation in places that do, and I still keep an eye out for bottles and cans.)

tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago

The shopping cart locking-if-it-leaves-the-parking-lot feature is a thing in Germany (not universally, but I've seen it e.g. at ALDI).

andrepd 1y ago

The big supermarket in my town does it, but that's because students stole the shopping carts to carry booze during the year-end party and parade!

andrepd 1y ago

In the Netherlands most people shop at a small store, not at a big box surrounded by a sea of parking. So no shopping carts there.

schwartzworld 1y ago

Using a 1 pound coin is basically saying “it costs a pound to take this and not bring it back.” It works for lazy returners, but makes blatant theft quite easy.

wcunning 1y ago

Student housing near the engineering campus at University of Michigan is about 1/2 mile away from the reasonably close Kroger grocery store. When I started there in 2009, the carts didn't have the locking wheels and many people would take the cart all the way back to their apartment complex -- this meant that the Kroger store manager had to rent a moving van every so often and go collect them all as the carts cost $500~1000 new, so replacing them when they're 1/2 mile to a mile away wasn't good economics. Eventually this got so bad (never a cart at the store when you wanted one, had to go get them all the time) that they switched to the geolocking wheels, which was a pain because the geolock frequently false detected if you were at the back of the annoyingly small parking lot, so there were always carts stuck in the back ~20 spots. Later, my girlfriend told me that the specialty foreign foods store near the Big Lots she worked at in a different Detroit suburb would intentionally come steal the Big Lots carts, rather than pay for their own (see above, expensive), so the Big Lots clerks would occasionally get sent on a mission with a moving van to get a bunch of their carts from the next shopping center over's parking lot. I think they might not have ever paid for the geolocking wheels, since Big Lots is low margin and those options are pretty expensive, but you can see the incentive to do so.

account42 1y ago
Was prosecuting the thieves ever considered? It wouldn't even have to involve law enforcement in this case but could be handled through the university. Sometimes even a little bit of deterrence is much more effective than a mountain of technical solutions.
stavros 1y ago
I've seen carts with stacks of disks for wheels (with gaps between them). The parking lot edges have grates that are the width of the disks, so if you push a cart over this, it'll fall in and stop moving. You have to pick it up and carry it out, which might be enough of a roadblock to deter some casual theft.

munificent 1y ago

Probably a combination of: * In a high-trust high social cohesion culture, you can rely on people returning carts all the way to where they belong instead of just selfishly leaving them in the parking lot once they are done with it. * In the US, the opioid epidemic means there are many more homeless drug addicts. Stolen shopping carts are useful for them to move their stuff around.

Terretta 1y ago

Localized to where? They are at every Aldi in Tenerife...

magicmicah85 1y ago

https://ourworldindata.org/trust https://ourworldindata.org/trust Some of us live in a low trust society. But this is such a cool talk. My local Giant (grocery store) has a wire that goes along the left side of their parking lot. Only about 20 spots there but once you cross that line, the wheel locks. It took me 2-3 trips of confusion why the cart was breaking before a store employee shouted at me "you're gonna lock it" right as I crossed the line. He came out to me, unlocked it and we had a long talk about how it all works.

mgarciaisaia 1y ago

https://www.tiktok.com/@canal26argentina/video/7169586172967079173 https://www.tiktok.com/@canal26argentina/video/7169586172967... Argentinian fans during Qatar's FIFA World Cup 2022 using a shopping cart as a barbequeue grill. A friend of mine had stolen one with his brothers back when we were in primary school. But stores here simply have a guard on their parking lots to prevent people from taking the carts away - haven't seen any tech for that.

art0rz 1y ago

I'm from The Netherlands and I've seen carts with locking wheels. Granted it's very rare, but definitely a thing. I've lived in the US as well and have never seen them there, but it's a big country.