Rescued: 10 Carts - Utah, United States

Wednesday morning, I decided to make another excursion to rescue some shopping carts. Sadly, due to time constraints, I was not able to rescue every cart I found, but I like to think that this was a successful trip. I was surprised to find only two next to the front dumpster in the apartment complex, but I found plenty in the wrong parking lots.


Believe it or not, two differently sized carts from two very different stores were able to fit together so I didn't have to put the small one inside the big one.


These three were behind a grocery store, near their recycling bins. The one that belonged to the grocery store had some trash in it, which I cleaned up. The other two are Wal-Mart carts, which is across a very busy street. Even at a light with a lit crossing signal, it was surprisingly difficult to get the cars turning in front of me to stop long enough for me to push two carts through the crosswalk.

While returning the two carts to Wal-Mart, I actually watched a cart as it was abandoned by a bus stop in front of the store. A man with no obvious disabilities used it to take his one bag of groceries to the bus stop and just left it on the sidewalk. I retrieved that one, too.


On the way back from Wal-Mart, I found this dollar store cart next to the grocery store's gas station. To get there, it had to go through three very large parking lots and around the grocery store.


And this one was at the rear of the grocery store, between two of its four loading docks. It's a wonder it wasn't crushed by one of the trucks.

I then found a tiny cart that belonged to a tiny organic foods store. They only have three carts, which means that this soldier comprised a full third of the store's force. I like to think I helped a small business owner by returning that one, though I must have made an amusing sight. The cart was so small, I had to stack it inside a larger grocery store cart that I was simultaneously returning. I got several strange looks from drivers passing me on the roadway.


This is the grocery store cart that, after I cleared out the fast food trash, helped me return the tiny organic foods cart.


And I just had to return for this poor thing, abandoned nearly upside down on the street corner, not even close to a bus stop or its home store.

Rescued: 19 Carts - Utah, United States

This was my first official cart rescue on April 14, 2009. I took pictures of most of it.

I live in an apartment complex behind a shopping center. My neighbors like to bring their shopping home in the carts from the stores in that shopping center, which is fine by me, but they seldom bother to return the carts.


This is a Wal-Mart cart. To get it back to Wal-Mart, I had to haul it out of the complex and through the shopping center, find an intersection where I could cross a six-lane road, and take it up the sidewalk to the Wal-Mart parking lot. According to Google Maps, that's almost three-quarters of a mile.

The really sad part about this one is that this cart had been wandering around the apartment complex for a few days before I got to taking it back. You see it in the picture above upright near one of the apartment buildings. The day before, it was sideways on the grass near that tree. The day before that, it was sideways in the dirt about 20 feet to my left from where I was standing when this picture was taken. That means someone (or some people) actually took the time to move it those short distances. How is that helping?

After collecting this cart, I went up to the apartment complex entrance and collected several more. Not pictured are the eight dollar store carts I returned to the north side of the shopping center nearby. I then came back for these:

I connected the Wal-Mart cart from before with one I found other in a parking space near the entrance to the apartment complex.

This third Wal-Mart abductee was tucked behind the dumpster. I don't know how long the poor thing sat there holding all that trash. Obviously, the dumpster was getting full, but I still managed to make room for that pile of garbage (and, yes, I washed up when I was done with all of this).

For my third and final trip, I collected some blue carts.

These were also near the dumpster. I lined them up for a photo before taking them back to their homes.

Two of these carts are from FYE, a store that sells music, movies, and video games. I have to wonder just how much entertainment someone must have purchased to need a cart to walk it all back home... twice. The other two, were taken from Ross (a clothing store) and Bed Bath & Beyond.

On the way back with the first four blue carts, I also found these four Ross carts. This is just across the street from the apartment complex, in an alley behind the shopping center where more dumpsters were kept and where most stores had their loading docks. These carts were already lined up this way. My only guess is that someone thought they were doing a favor by arranging all the carts together or that one cart was abandoned here and other shoppers thought it was a cart collection point. Either way, I still had to get these to the front of the building and past four other store fronts to get them back to their home.

How Things Work at the Foundation

Here's how it works:

Step 1: Find abandoned shopping carts. An abandoned cart is one that has been taken--by a person moving it or by some other means such as weather--from the store to which it belongs. It must be out of its home store parking lot to count as abandoned.

Step 2: Take a picture of the cart as you found it.

Step 3 (optional): If possible, return the cart to its home store. Pictures of this activity are also encouraged.

Step 4: Email your story and/or picture(s) to me. Most of them will be published here. You will have done a good deed for your community as well as for the store and its staff, and you will be publicly recognized for it! Please indicate in your email how you would like your story credited to you--by name, by screen name, by initials, or anonymously. Also note that by submitting pictures to me, you affirm that you are not violating any copyrights and you grant me permission to post them here without making any changes to them, though you still retain ownership and all other rights to the picture.


Honorable Mentions:
If you've found a cart that's still in its home store's parking lot but that has been somehow abused, I'll happily accept pictures of it as well. An abused cart is one that has been mistreated by the customers or that has been distressed from being left outside for too long. It can be upside down, run over, or significantly damaged by weather. In an effort to end shopping cart abuse, these pictures may be published as well.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Save the Shopping Carts Foundation! No, I'm not going to ask for donations. This foundation exists to encourage people everywhere to return shopping carts to the stores to which they belong, regardless of whether it is your cart or not.

Returning a shopping cart not only keeps the community looking good, it actually helps the economy. How? Think of it this way:
The average shopping cart costs a retail store between $60 and $125.
When enough shopping carts disappear for long enough periods, store management must consider purchasing replacements.
Buying one replacement cart is the equivalent of one full shift (sometimes two) for the average part-time retail employee.
The money for that shopping cart has to come from somewhere, and the first target for cutting costs in retail is usually the labor budget.
Store managers sometimes have to cut an employee's hours just to replace equipment.

Rescuing a cart allows retail employees to keep working. When retail employees are working, the stores are kept clean, customers get the help they need, the business thrives, and the employees get to spend their paychecks with other businesses. When the employees' hours are cut, the store suffers, the customers are unhappy, and less money flows through the national economy.

So let's all help each other out. Go rescue those abandoned carts!