Theft On Wheels

In researching the hazards and problems surrounding shopping trolleys, I came across this interesting paper called Preventing retail crime by Susan Geason and Paul R Wilson and published by the Australian Institute of Criminology in 1992.

Here's what it had to say about supermarket trolleys and crime:

Loss of shopping trolleys
Shopping carts have a way of disappearing, especially where customers walk to the store instead of driving.

In Australia shopping trolleys cost about $200 each and most supermarkets have about $25,000 worth of them at any given time. About 5 per cent of all supermarket shopping trolleys disappear (personal communication, Australian Supermarket Institute 1991).

Shopping cart corrals: Supermarkets have dealt with trolley disappearances in a number of ways, for example many stores have installed barriers to keep carts at the customer loading zone in front of the store, though this does not stop all trolley theft.

Some markets allow customers to take carts to their cars and send employees out to scour the neighbourhood for carts people have taken home; others offer rewards for finding lost carts.

Cart corrals allow people to use carts however they want, but encourage them to return them on their own. This is how they work. A customer walks over to the cart storage area and puts a coin or a token in a device that has locked a cart to the cart in front of it. The first cart is then freed and the customer can use it in the store and the parking lot. The customer's coin is returned when he or she pushes the cart back into the cart corral.

Although that report is quite a few years ago now, I don't believe the facts will have changed over much. It's a pity that such an obvious solution, identified 16 years ago has not resulted in universal action.