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.