Shopping Carts as Cars
- From: GoldenStatePoppy@xxxxxxx
- Date: 30 Oct 2005 05:24:09 -0800
Posted on Sat, Oct. 29, 2005
CARTS AS CARS
By Edwin Garcia
San Jose Mercury News
Maria Taffoya doesn't own a car. Doesn't need one. The Mountain View
mother of two gets around just fine with a shopping cart.
She lugs it to the laundry. Pushes it to pick up her kids from school.
And, of course, strolls to the supermarket, where she can trade it for
another -- as long as employees, or police, don't stop her at the edge
of the parking lot.
``Oooh, it's very handy,'' Taffoya explained while pausing at Castro
School with her 4-year-old son sitting inside the green plastic cart
from Beverages & More.
Despite city and state laws devised to keep shopping carts attached to
their stores, the rolling units have long had gritty second lives as
carryalls for homeless urban nomads -- overflowing with everything from
aluminum cans to mattresses to clothes.
But even as officials do more to cut down on losing carts, tough
economic times have resulted in more people employing carts as personal
carryall units -- replacing the cars they can't afford. While more
folks are figuring out ways to get carts and efficiently share them
with others, stores are increasingly playing a costly, never-ending
game of hunt and retrieve.
Cart economics
Shopping carts run upward of $80. Some cities, including San Jose,
impound abandoned carts for a $75 fee to the stores. Retrieval
services, too, are making money from stray carts -- companies are hired
by store managers to race around San Jose and rescue the metal and
plastic vehicles before the city's impound truck makes its own rounds.
``It's a very expensive proposition when the carts walk away from the
property,'' said Karen Brown, senior vice president of the Food
Marketing Institute in Washington D.C., an organization that represents
hundreds of grocery stores nationwide. ``Since we make less than a
penny on a dollar of sales, we have to sell 100 times the cost of the
cart to make up that loss.''
But if managers are too aggressive about retrieving them, customers who
need them might shop elsewhere.
Taffoya, 42, spends less time at the Mountain View Wal-Mart since it
equipped its carts with a device that stops them from rolling off the
store's parking lot.
``I'd have to carry everything from the store,'' she says. ``You get
really tired.''
Carts are vital to East San Jose residents at the food pantry behind
Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in San Jose.
``Look,'' said 41-year-old Oscar Garcia, scanning the carts at the
pantry's food giveaway. ``They're all different colors.'' The yellow
cart came from Pink Elephant. The green from Dollar Tree. The blue from
Rite Aid. ``There comes another one from Dollar Tree,'' he says with
enthusiasm.
Rodrigo Padilla Marquez, a construction worker standing in a nearby
line said, ``In reality, a lot of people don't have a car.'' In fact,
he describes carts as ``dollar bills'' that pass with value among many
people. ``One of the carts that's here,'' he said, ``can end up all the
way in Milpitas.''
Since the mid-1990s it has been illegal for people to possess carts,
and cities have been empowered to impound carts. But the statutes are
rarely enforced, said Gilbert Canizales, director of local government
relations for the California Grocers Association.
Under state law, store owners have three days to retrieve abandoned
carts before they are fined as much as $50 for each occurrence. San
Jose levies a $75 per cart penalty, and against the will of the state's
grocers, city law allows code enforcement officers to impound carts 24
hours after the city receives a complaint.
However, the city doesn't penalize what seems to be even more new cart
users.
``I don't want to criminalize poverty,'' said Jamie L. Matthews, a San
Jose code enforcement officer instrumental in drafting the local
ordinance. The intent of the law was urge stores to keep carts on the
premises.
Matthews calls the law ``dramatically successful,'' noting that the
monthly average of pickups dropped from 1,400 carts down to 400.
Nonetheless, in a two-hour drive around San Jose, Matthews passed 22
carts that were either abandoned or being pushed. About half of them in
high-density neighborhoods near Monterey Road.
He pulled into an apartment complex on Blossom Hill Road to show one of
the more successful solutions to keeping carts out of public view: A
fenced area, established by a landlord, where tenants are encouraged to
drop off (and pick up) carts.
``It's a superb balance between the needs of the community and the
consumer and the owner of the cart,'' Matthews said.
San Jose also gives away ``granny carts'' -- rolling, portable wire
baskets. More than 1,000 of them were purchased using federal grant
money, and distributed mostly at senior centers.
Free carts too light
``They're too light, so they flip over,'' said Don Raymond Jr., 32, who
gave up on the portable carts when his broke down on the way to the
laundromat. Now he keeps a large Costco cart parked in his South San
Jose back yard.
Some stores are turning to under-asphalt devices -- found at the
Wal-Mart on Monterey Highway -- which cause a wheel to lock at the edge
of the parking lot.
``It's made a tremendous improvement in the number of carts that leave
the property,'' said Marty Heires of Wal-Mart. Still, ``It's not 100
percent. If you wanted to carry the cart you could, but that gets a lot
more difficult.''
Some stores, such as El Mercadito Latino in Redwood City, favor the
low-tech solution: Each cart is affixed with a tall vertical pipe that
hits a metal horizontal bar at the top of the store's front door.
Before installing the pipes, said assistant manager Jesús Corona, ``We
were buying carts all the time.''
Other stores use a friendly method: Courtesy clerks offer to push the
customers' carts to their cars.
Garcia, leaning into his cart overflowing with produce, said he and
other needy users will always find ways to get the valuable carts.
``It's like car sharing,'' he said. ``It's a modern method of getting
around.''
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