Stores find solutions to shopping- cart theft

'If you look at the bus stops ... the sidewalks,
it looks like a refuge,' Wally Dean says

By Kelly Wilkinson

For most people, grocery carts are simply utilitarian means of hauling purchases out to the car. For others, they serve a more vital purpose--they hold recyclables that will bring in a day's wage, they provide shelter in stormy weather and they offer a way for those without cars to lug a load of dirty whites to the local laundromat.

But for Robyn Webb, the carts represent an $8,000 to $10,000 cut into his profits each year. As manager of the Safeway in Sunnyvale for six years, straying carts have long been a bane of his existence.

Now, with the April installation of a front-wheel clamping system that activates when a cart is wheeled over a yellow spray-painted line, Webb and others are hoping their carts will stay in their rightful place. Webb figures since he's been manager, he's lost 50 to 100 carts every six months due to theft, at the cost of between $75 and $100 per cart. Since Webb installed CAPS (Cart Anti-Theft Protection System) on 150 of his 200-cart stock, not one of the protected carts has disappeared. Of the 50 remaining, 35 have been stolen.

And Webb isn't alone in his cart frustrations. According to the Food Marketing Institute in Washington D.C., annual losses total over $800 million globally, and $15 million in California.

In response to those statistics, former investor John French spent more than two years developing the CAPS system that Webb and well over 100 other grocery stores around the country now employ.

"We learned that this was a huge problem and about all the money associated with it," French said. "So we nosed around and determined there wasn't a good solution."

In theory, the system French developed is similar to the electric fences that give dogs' necks a yank when they cross an underground boundary. It's comprised of a 1-inch wire loop running under the perimeter of the parking lot that connects to a low-power antenna. If the cart strays over the bright boundaries painted on the property, a signal prompts a boot to lock over the wheel, thus preventing it from rolling any further. French said the debilitated carts need an electric zap from store personnel to deactivate the clamp and return them to stock.

And with this invention, an entire cottage industry now may be disrupted, said Debra Lambert, corporate director of public affairs for the Pleasanton-based Safeway chain.

"This is something that tends to be a phenomenon in California," she said. "It floors people that it's such a problem here."

She said Safeway and other retailers that provide carts for their customers often turn to retrieval services to round up strays. "The retrieval services are a necessity," Lambert said. "But unfortunately, on their own they're not improving the situation."

According to Lambert, the retrieval companies turn million-dollar profits from homing in on where grocery carts are usually dumped, collecting them in vans, and returning them to their home bases. She said stores employ their services as often as their needs require.

But this measure is reactive instead of proactive, can become quite costly and does nothing to deter cart hoarders.

Webb said his store's security caught one of the retrieval services picking up carts on the property and bringing them back as strays at the end of the day.

"I'm sure that's the exception to the rule," Lambert said. "For the most part, they're very helpful and honest."

Webb also talks of a black market for the used carts in Mexico, with store surveillance cameras capturing dark vans pulling into parking lots in the middle of the night and carrying away dozens of carts.

Other industry-tested solutions include a laser-triggered locking device, a fifth-wheel system that would sometimes engage in the grocery store aisles, and posting security guards. But according to Webb, the various stabs at solutions have largely been ineffective, awkward or clunky.

Webb said he and other grocers have also tried a quarter loan fee for the carts, where shoppers inserted a quarter into the cart bay, which was then reimbursed when they returned the carts. But Webb said it failed because of inconvenience.

"How many times do you always have a quarter on you when you go shopping?" he asked.

Lambert said that in her experience, cart theft transcends social status. "A lot of the perception is that it's an economic issue or connected to homeless," she said. "But that's a very minor part."

The only commonalty she points to is the location of stores--the hardest hit are in dense areas where most shoppers need to walk or where parking is tight.

Cupertino Mayor Wally Dean called grocery carts "a blight on the city" and asked for aggressive city legislation.

"If you look at the bus stops, the streets and the sidewalks, it looks like a refuge," he said.

Dean said that the way state law is written, grocery stores and other retailers have 36 hours to respond to the notification of a hot cart outside their property limits, which he calls "the hitch and the get-up."

"You can't go after the retailers, but we'd at least like to meet with them," he said, calling the situation a catch-22 because the retailers cannot be cited. This leaves enforcement of any potential legislation and costs up to the city.

Dean said he unsuccessfully attempted to get the item on City Council agenda six months ago but said it failed because other councilmembers suggested the problem wasn't serious enough to act on.

"We've reached the point in time where the rubber needs to hit the road," he said, speaking of creating a violation specifically for cart criminals. "It's not theft, but it's the same thing. It's brutal."

Sue Johnson, Sunnyvale resident and neighborhood activist against cart litter, commended Nob Hill Foods' old-fashioned practice of providing baggers who then walk the groceries to the shopper's car. Nob Hill's corporate spokesperson Susan Kennedy said this service has kept cart theft lower than it is for other chains.

"Typically, our courtesy clerks carry them out and then run back so there are no carts in the lot, which means there is no real recovery program," she said.

But for stores that provide liberal amounts of carts in a broad area, French said the CAPS system's success is owed to its transparency and lack of intrusion in the shopping experience.

Plus, it's effective, according to Lambert. "Once it crosses that electric boundary, it just stops."

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