Clean Up During Return Shopping Carts to the Supermarket Month
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 02.12.07
While other sites are promoting today as Darwin Day, we feel it important to point out also that the US Census Bureau says that February is Return Shopping Carts to the Supermarket Month.. Evidently nearly 2 million shopping carts are stolen each year, and the environmental impact is huge. Cart Month was the idea of Anthony Dinolfo, a grocery store owner whose carts had turned up just about everywhere imaginable. As he watched the 1969 historic event of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, he had amusing thought. “I said I wouldn’t be surprised if he found a shopping cart in one of the craters,” Dinolfo told the Chicago Sun-Times. So in honour of the occasion, pull a cart out of the ditch.
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Wow. This must be a sign from God. There was a shopping cart left in my driveway yesterday. I wanted to keep it and make something...www.makezine.com'ish from it. Morally, I felt fine....now I know what I must do.
In the town that I live in, they have passed an ordinance that places a heavy return fee on the store where the shopping cart came from (like $500 per cart). This has prompted every single store in my town to install sensors in the parking lots and electronic collars on every single cart. Take the cart past the sensor (really just an EM field), the collar locks and the cart no longer rolls if it leaves the parking lot. I am sure homeless people are downright pissed. But cart stealing is literally no longer a problem.
i dont kno if they're a national chain or not, but Aldi, the discount supermarket chain has this setup where you have to put in a quarter to get a cart, and when you return your cart and link it back to the others when youre done using it, you get your quarter back. they also charge for shopping bags, and if you dont have your own bags, and dont want to pay for their bags, you can take the large cardboard sort of flats the products are shipped in and reuse them to transport your groceries. their prices are superlow, their employees make a very nice hourly wage, im pretty sure theyre union, with benefits. now that i type about it, aldi is an amazing company.
A somewhat mentally disabled individual lives in the apartment above me. He works at a grocery store about a block away from where I live. Since he doesn't drive (I don't know if he can), he uses a shopping cart to bring his groceries home. But the last time he did that, it snowed, and the shopping cart is still helplessly locked in snow and ice outside the apartment. It's been two or three months now. I'm sure the grocery store could reclaim it if they came by with a couple ice picks. ;-) Or they could wait until spring and he'll bring it right back, I'm sure.
Hi
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