New York
CNN
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Santa Fe, New Mexico, paid a local contractor $47,000 to round up about 3,000 shopping carts around the city in 2021 and 2022.
Fayetteville, North Carolina, spent $78,468 collecting carts from May 2020 to October 2022.
Shopping carts keep wandering away from their stores, draining taxpayers’ coffers, causing blight and frustrating local officials and retailers.
Abandoned shopping carts are a scourge to neighborhoods, as wayward carts block intersections, sidewalks and bus stops. They occupy handicap spots in parking lots and wind up in creeks, ditches and parks. And they clog municipal drainage and waste systems and cause accidents.
There is no national data on shopping cart losses, but US retailers lose an estimated tens of millions of dollars every year replacing lost and damaged carts, say shopping cart experts. They pay vendors to rescue stray carts and fork over fines to municipalities for violating laws on shopping carts. They also miss out on sales if there aren’t enough carts for customers during peak shopping hours.
Last year, Walmart paid $23,000 in fines related to abandoned shopping carts to the small town of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, said Shawn McDonald, a member of the town’s Select Board.
Dartmouth public workers spent two years corralling more than 100 Walmart carts scattered around town and housed them in one of the city’s storage facilities. When Walmart applied for a new building permit, the company was told it had to pay the town thousands of dollars in daily storage fees, McDonald said.
“It’s a safety issue with these carts careening down the hill. I had one that was left in the road as I was driving,” he said. “I got to the point where I got pissed.”
More municipalities around the country are proposing laws cracking down on stray carts. They are imposing fines on retailers for abandoned carts and fees for retrieval services, as well as mandates for stores to lock up their carts or install systems to contain them. Some localities are also fining people who remove carts from stores.
The city council in Ogden, Utah, this month approved an ordinance fining people who take store carts or are in possession of one. The measure also authorizes the city to charge retailers a fee of $2 a day for storage and handling fees to retrieve lost carts.
“Abandoned shopping carts have become an increasing nuisance on public and private properties throughout the city,” the council said in its summary of the bill. City officials “are spending considerable amounts of time to pick up and return or dispose of the carts.”
Matthew Dodson, the president of Retail Marketing Services, which offers cart retrieval, maintenance and other services to…
Read More: Abandoned shopping carts cost taxpayers thousands of dollars