Have Cart Will Travel

[TruthHurts]

Two women come in and buy 5 cases of beer. They push the cart outside and we assume they are just taking them to their car. One of our locals comes in and alerts us that the women have wheeled the cart off our property and across the street.

I watch the two women who thankfully stop at a rental at the end of the street. I assume that once they unload their beers that they will return the cart. 30 minutes later, the cart is still sitting outside the house, the women nowhere to be seen.

My now fed up co-worker crosses the street and goes to retrieve the cart. She finds the women sitting on the patio, enjoying their beers. She tells them that the carts are store property and not to be removed.

Did the women even apologize? No, of course not. They bitched about having no other way to get the beers to their house. Gee, how about making two trips or going to get your car? But then again that would have required these women to use logic and possibly damage their brains.

We are a small store with very few carts, we can't afford to have people running off with them.

[Bright_Star]

Why can't stores set up an "invisible fence" that once you go beyond a certain limit, it deactivates the cart & it can't be used?

[lobo94]

Some places do-you cross a boundary, and one of the wheels will lock.

[mikoyan29]

Stores should start reporting that as theft because it is.

[bainsidhe]

This was a huge peeve of mine when I worked at MalMart. The bus stop is about a block away from the property, and folks would pile and toss carts around the stop, or leave them where the wind would blow them into traffic. I've also seen people tip the carts over, so they could sit on them like a bench. The store was about a mile or so away from the mall, which had another bus stop. Folks would abandon carts there too.

[gremcint]

I've done this once but then returned it immediately. Me and my sister were walking home from a mall and we were able to use carts most of the way home because we were actually returning them to their stores in our path. We actually used one that had ended up a good 10 minute walk from where it should be for the walk home.

[Draper Mel]

Where I used to live in Indianapolis, the Family Dollar at the end of my street almost never had carts because people would take them. They once got about 5 or 6 new ones in; within a week they were gone.

In the skeezier neighborhoods, there was a local grocery store chain that had posts around the entrance and exit so people couldn't take the carts outside at all. There was a Kroger a short bus ride away that had the cart stopper system, but people still seemed to be able to get around it. There were always carts at the bus stop.

[MoonCat]

The thrift store near where I live had to have tall poles attached to all of their carts. The pole makes it impossible to take the cart out of the building. It's a shame that stores have to do things like that.

Last week some idiot left a K-mart cart out in front of my house. The cart was full of signs...those little lawn signs you sometimes see advertising local stores or whatever...somebody took the signs, and then eventually the cart.

[downforit2008]

I hate the customers at my store for hauling MY carts off our store property. The managers cheated us in the remodel on the numbers of carts we were supposed to get and got 350 less carts than required for a bustling, large superstore in a thriving district, so it pisses me off that we barely have enough carts as it is and I have to go into the trailer park next to our property and haul off 50 carts a week that the trashy people who live in that area take and stash on their streets. Had to even recover an electric handicapped cart 9 blocks from our store! When I was getting about 7 or 8 carts out of the trailer park a year ago, some damn moron's dog attacked me and sliced up my bare leg pretty badly with a swipe of it's claws. Never did find out who the owner was, but I was dragging a shopping cart out of THEIR yard when the stupid dog attacked me. When the hell do I get HAZARD pay for this crap???

[Rainman]

My old roommate ganked a grocery cart when he went to go buy all the party supplies for his 21st birthday at our condo maybe a mile from the store. During the party he must have been smacked in the mouth with overwhelming guilt. Because he left his own party, hammered off his ass, to go return it.

[gremcint]

I've always wondered how much a shopping cart costs, If I lived in town and stores were within walking distance I think I'd buy one. An actual one not a little fold up one and hang signs on it saying not store property and then use it all over town.

[NoMoreRetail]

I used to live in an apartment complex that was across from a walmart. The exit gate would always have about 10 carts lined up near by for people to use when the went to and from the store. What pissed me off is the management knew they were there and never did anything about it! I swear the people who lived there were some of the most ghetto people I had ever met!

[blas]

There's a huge apartment building (was a hospital many years ago, haunted as hell and I'm never going back!) where a lot of poor college aged kids and retirees without a lot of money live in the city my parents live in.

You walk in where the reception used to be, it's two big wings that go to either side of the apartments.....and at the bottom of each stairwell is a bunch of carts. I'm wondering how some of these carts from stores that are over a mile or two away on the HIGHWAY got there, considering this is a very podunk town with absolutely NO busses, only taxi vans that only operate on certain hours.

[NateTheChops]

That was a problem at the Aid of Rite. For a whole year we didn't have any carts and people were astonished as to why this could be. These were usually the same people who would try to leave with the carts when we finally got new ones that were equipped with the tall metal poles.

[telecom_goddess]

I haven't done it in a really long time but I used to have to take carts home when grocery shopping because I had NO other way. No car, a cab costs too much and I was using food stamps at the time. But I wasn't carting home beer I was carting home actual groceries. A guy would come around the neighborhood and pick them up again.

Now we have a van we can go grocery shopping in.