A dog sits in a shopping cart Friday outside of the Community Kitchen in Chattanooga. Some area grocery stores are buying carts with locking wheels to keep them from being carried off.
Shopping carts equipped with wheels that will lock if someone tries to steal the carts are lined up in front of the Bi-Lo supermarket in East Ridge near Camp Jordan.SHOPPING CART FACTS• Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain in Oklahoma City, Okla., is credited with inventing the shopping cart in 1937.• There’s an average of 200 to 250 shopping carts in each of the 100,000 grocery stores in the United States.• U.S. retailers buy between 2 million and 3 million shopping carts annually.• Shopping carts last four to six years in high-volume stores — longer if they’re kept inside, less time if they’re not maintained.Source: Progressive Grocer magazine
Joy Williams is jealous of the shopping carts that Bi-Lo has at its East Ridge supermarket on Ringgold Road near Camp Jordan.
People have a hard time stealing the Bi-Lo carts, because they’re equipped with wheels that lock up once a cart gets pushed past a wire antenna buried in the parking lot. It’s the same concept as a buried “invisible fence” that triggers a dog’s shock collar.
Meanwhile, Williams, who manages the Family Dollar store next door to Bi-Lo, has seen her shopping cart supply dwindle.
“Ours don’t lock,” said Williams, who blames losses on people living nearby in a residential hotel and at a homeless encampment. “They steal ours all the time.”