Comment by Ghoelian
1 day 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.
> which is pretty cheap for a whole ass trolley.
It's not an incentive to "not steal the trolley", it's an incentive to put it back in its place for people who were already not planning on stealing one.
This way the store and the customers don't have to deal with trolleys strewn around everywhere and blocking parking spaces, among other advantages.
I think when they removed the coins during Covid they just noticed that most people were already well-behaved enough to return the carts to their places, so the incentive is just not needed anymore. Actually in Belgium, Colruyt had never had coins for their carts and it just works.
> it's an incentive to put it back in its place for people who were already not planning on stealing one.
It’s also an incentive for anyone else.
If I put the coin in and then leave the cart in the lot anyways, someone who wanders by is also incentivized to grab it and put it back, as they would get a free coin.
The system is actually somewhat elegant, if you return the cart you pay nothing and if you don’t you pay a small fine to whoever does.
In the United States, carts are free. There is a stereotype that homeless people have shopping carts in which they keep their things.
There's no particular need to change this, because one person can only use so many shopping carts. If you maintain the price at "free", demand saturates and people stop stealing carts.
It's common for people to return carts to a designated area, and it's also not rare for people to just leave the carts somewhere convenient for them. Store employees periodically go around and move the carts back to the place where you expect to pick them up.
Costco is an interesting hybrid case. They make it easy to return the carts "correctly" by providing little depots scattered throughout their enormous parking lot. Realistically, the parking lot is so large that very few people would be willing to return a cart to the front of the store, where you get the cart from if you're going shopping.
However, people also aren't going to pick up carts from those depots deep within the parking lot and wheel them over to the store. So Costco employees still have to make rounds of the parking lot and move carts that have been left there to their correct location at the front of the store. But for Costco, you're supposed to leave the cart in the parking lot, but only in certain locations.
You say this like it’s only Costco that has return bays. I’ve rarely encountered ANY store that has shopping carts but doesn’t have return bays throughout the parking lot.
You should actually read the comment you reply to...
> If you maintain the price at "free", demand saturates and people stop stealing carts.
If the price is $1, the same people who'll steal them will keep stealing them (with a screwdriver it's easy to pry your coin back out of the slot anyway).
> it's also not rare for people to just leave the carts somewhere convenient for them
With the coin, guess what... it will be rarer, because the people have incentive to get their coin back. At least in theory. And if someone doesn't care about their change, some enterprising kids might return the carts anyway to gain some money, and the end result for the supermarket is the same: carts at their designated return locations. The worker just has to go to 3 or 4 of these locations instead of running up and down the parking lot collecting all the stray carts.
2 replies →
Those "depots" are commonly called cart corrals.
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.
I still see that in our town except he drives around maybe once a year. It just isn't a problem here. Even with unlocked carts now.
The coin isn’t supposed to stop you from stealing the whole cart, it’s supposed to stop you from abandoning the cart in the parking lot.