It’s my fantasy law: enact a $100 fine for every single missing shop cart which will be paid for by the business from whom it was stolen. If 10 carts are taken from OSH, then OSH will owe the city of Los Angeles $1,000.00 or [$100 x 10.]
In my neighborhood, we have stolen carts from: 99 Ranch Market, Sav-on Drugs, Costco, Target, Ralphs, Vons, OSH. If every single recovered cart that is taken from these stores represented a loss of $100 to each of those stores…… you can bet they would try and control them. These carts eventually end up as open air garbage bins. Along Victory, there are more shopping carts then flowers.
There is one community minded retailer in Van Nuys: Jons, on the corner of Sepulveda and Sherman Way. This scrupulously clean shopping center has magnetic strips embedded in the asphalt that prevent shopping carts from being removed from the parking lot.
Can Costco, with $880 million dollars in net profits in 2004, afford to take some action to stop the shopping cart pollution of Van Nuys? I think so.
Here in Van Nuys 
I used to live in a small city in Alberta, Canada and the stores there paid something for each cart returned. Not enough for an individual to take a single cart back, but there was a guy who went around a couple of times a week with his pick-up and, well, picked ’em up. He was his own little industry, really.
In Seattle my neighborhood Safeway have a little “boot” on one of the wheels of their carts, and when you go past a certain (magnetic?/electronic?) point the boot clamps down on the wheel making it impossible to move.
It’s amazing to me the stuff we are willing to pay for in this country and the services we are not. People downtown in $300.00 shoes, walking on a sidewalk littered with garbage. How glamorous it that?
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Good point Chris.
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We have the same problem in Encino. The tenants in our apt building feel it is there right to use the shopping cart up until their doorstep and let someone else figure out how to get it back to the store. It also causes a fire hazard in the hallways and creates an eye sore on the streets.
Another thing that really gets me mad is when people leave beds and sofas on the sidewalk for someone else to pick up. Its gross and makes everyone’s quality of life go down. I think the stores should start going after people who leave the premises with a cart or create some sort of barrier around the store so that shoppers can only take the cart so far..like they do at IKEA.
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You should talk to your Senior Lead Officers in Van Nuys about doing shopping cart sweeps once a month. They do that in Sherman Oaks, I can’t see why the wouldn’t in Van Nuys. I wrote about this in my blog about the Basic Car Meeting, interesting stuff:
http://shermanoaks.blogspot.com/2005/11/basic-cars.html
Also, I vaguely remember hearing that taking a shopping cart from a property of a business is against federal law. But I’ve been too lazy to research that one…
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