Is the wild shopping cart facing extinction?
Published Friday August 15th, 2008
It's one of those memories that is so bizarre, you never forget it.
It was back around 1980 when I was still in school, working a part-time job at the old Woolco store in Champlain Place. Consider it one of those "character-building" jobs that convince you to find a career that you enjoy.
Every night, we used to have to walk all over the parking lot to gather up all the shopping carts that were left behind by inconsiderate people who couldn't be bothered bringing them back to the store. If we missed any, we'd get a good chewing out from the store manager the next day.
It was just after 10 p.m. on a Saturday night after a long day of working in the trenches of retail lunacy and the last thing I wanted to do was scour the parking lot for shopping carts.
I had just turned the corner by the old Junction Club, which later became Don Cherry's, when I heard a commotion. I watched with amusement as a couple of bouncers at the nightclub gave a rowdy drunk patron the heave-ho out the door and down the five or six steps, where he got himself a nice case of road-rash on the side of his face.
Amusement turned to horror as I watched the guy stagger to his feet. He grabbed a shopping cart, lifted it over his head and heaved it through the air more than 20 feet, just like Michael Jordan making a foul shot. The cart bounced off the steel railing and scored a direct hit on the bouncers, sending them running for cover.
More than 25 years later, those darn steel cages on wheels continue to be the silent workhorses of the retail industry, the pickup truck of the homeless and a cash cow for Bubbles, the fictional cart rustler from Sunnyvale Trailer Park in Dartmouth. Shopping carts are praised as trusted companions of hard-core shoppers and cursed by others as a menace to society. And now they are about to have their wobbly wheels and flaky chrome pushed a step closer to extinction.
In case you missed it, the Times & Transcript reported on the front page exactly one week ago that Champlain Place is laying down the law on the cagey four-wheelers. As of Sept. 2, customers will no longer be allowed to take shopping carts out of the stores to which they belong, except to ferry goods to their vehicles. For years the carts have been filled by consumers and pushed out of the stores where they truly belong. They wind up abandoned in hallways, entryways, and the parking lot.
Those that aren't retrieved by the humble cart-collectors are often stolen. In winter, the wild carts are often struck by plows and driven into piles of snow, where they remain until spring and emerge as twisted, rusty wrecks.
The mall management has apparently had enough of it, and the decision has turned into one of those divisive issues where there are good arguments on either side. The people in favour of the decision say it's about time because the darn carts are a nuisance. Those against it say they rely on the carts to get their shopping done. And of course both sides are well-represented on the discussion boards of our website, where armchair critics regularly gather to spout opinions, often from behind a convenient cloak of anonymity.
Opinions aside, the shopping cart debate brings up a serious question.
Where are people supposed to put the stuff they are buying? Over the last 10 years, Metro Moncton has grown into a central retail Mecca that attracts shoppers from all over New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and elsewhere. The malls are jam-packed with people who roam from store to store shopping.
During the peak shopping season, you can see them pushing carts piled high with bags of goodies. I know the mall wants to get control of the cart situation, but what will these people do? Shop until they their hands are full and then go to the car to dump it off? Will they go back into the mall for more? What if they are taking a bus?
I personally feel that the mall is right in bringing the cart situation under control. These contraptions are the property of the stores, they cost a lot of money and were designed for the convenience of people shopping INSIDE the store, not to be used as a personal baggage cart for people parked miles away, and then abandoned to become an obstacle in the doorway or out in the parking lot.
But if the malls want to control them, there has got to be an alternative for people who buy larger merchandise, or who want to shop their hearts out and collect many bags of merchandise to take home. If stores want people to spend money, they have got to make it convenient for the customer to get their purchases to the car, bus or however they are getting home.
Here's an idea. How about letting kids hockey teams or other non-profit groups work in the mall with a flat-bed carry-out cart to help people transport their purchases for tips? Or how about some bigger storage lockers where people could put an armload of stuff until they are ready to leave?
Whatever happens, it's better than letting unsuspecting shopping carts be used as missiles against bouncers or targets for snowplows.
n Alan Cochrane is an editor-at-large with the Times & Transcript. His column appears each Friday. He can be reached by e-mail at cochrana@timestranscript.com
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Comments (9)
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People taking the bus are already limited to buying only the amount they can physically carry-- you can't take a shopping cart on a bus.
I'm just wondering what else might not be ok for the mall soon. All the empty stores come to mind....
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We take the cart from Walmart to Sobeys to help carry that shopping THROUGH the mall TO Sobeys and then out AT Sobeys, into the taxi, leaving the cart responsibly.
Lockers? Where? Anywhere close to Walmart means we have to return to that place from Sobeys. Carrying our Sobeys shopping and then adding the Walmart stuff. Anywhere close to Sobeys - how do we ferry the shopping there?
Flat bed carry out cart? What to follow us with our shopping as we move on to Sobeys, perhaps distracted by any of the stores along the way?
These are seriously offered as solutions? Make the carts uniform so they get stored easily.
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You're right. But if you have ever done it, you should know that you can lift more shopping from a cart onto the bus and then off again and home than you can carry all through the mall while you continue shopping, looking at other items, use the washrooms, stop for a coffee, pick up items from shelves in your last port of call etc etc.
If you don't know this, then you should try something before commenting in ignorance.
If they want to prevent carts from going missing, why don't they replace them with carts that are locked together and take a quarter to unlock? The majority of people will return them in order to get their quarter back, and for those that don't there are always other people who will. When I lived elsewhere where these carts were the norm, it was rare to see a "wild cart".
This doesn't solve the mall problem (if there is indeed a problem) but to me, the lose carts in the parking lot are more of an issue. Now that cart corrals will only be outside the stores that have carts, I expect more wild carts as they will be abandoned in other areas where people have parked away from an anchor store. My car has enough dents from free blowing carts as it is.
You're going to push that cart back across the parking lot for 25c?
In europe the coin used equates to $2.