Shopping Carts Keep Disappearing From Stores

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In 2021 and 2022, Santa Fe, New Mexico, paid a local contractor $47,000 to collect around 3,000 shopping carts from throughout the city. From May 2020 through October 2022, Fayetteville, North Carolina, spent $78,468 collecting carts. Shopping carts frequently stray from their establishments, depleting tax revenue, generating litter, and upsetting municipal authorities and merchants.

Neighborhoods suffer greatly from abandoned shopping carts because they block bus stops, walkways, and intersections. They park in designated handicapped spaces and end up in parks, creeks, and ditches. Additionally, they cause accidents and block municipal waste and drainage systems. Despite the lack of national data on shopping cart losses, experts estimate that US merchants spend tens of millions of dollars annually repairing stolen and damaged carts. They pay retailers to find lost carts and pay fines to municipalities when shopping cart regulations are broken. If there aren't enough carts for customers during prime shopping hours, they also miss out on sales.

More local governments around the country are proposing laws to crack down on stray carts. They are enforcing penalties on businesses for abandoned carts, charging for cart retrieval services, and requiring stores to lock their carts or put in place containment mechanisms. In some areas, people who take carts out of stores are also subject to fines who take carts out of stores are also subject to fines. Last month in Ogden, Utah, the city council enacted an ordinance that imposes fines on those who steal or misuse store carts. The measure also gives the city the right to charge businesses $2 per day in storage and handling costs to recover lost carts.