Rescued: 13 Carts, Utah, United States

This morning, i decided to make another attempt at removing all those carts from the previous post. I figure that if I can clear them all out, the neighbors will be hesitant to abandon another cart there because it would be marginally embarrassing to be the person to leave just one cart. I think it's more likely, though, that they'll see that all of the carts have been taken away, and they will assume that they can leave more carts there because someone will come along and take them away.

It's a losing battle, but I'm going to keep fighting.

Where two days ago I found one cart, today I found two.

It's clear from this picture that the number of carts had diminished since the pictures I took on Thursday. Unfortunately, someone had been undermining my efforts. Another cart or two had been added to this mess, and one of the little carts had been thrown on top of one of the bigger ones so the owner of that car could park.

What I found interesting, though, was that two carts had disappeared. They were the colored ones from the dollar store and a local department store. It seemed that someone else was returning carts as well. I figured it might be local employees of those stores, but I couldn't be sure. In any case, I was momentarily happy that I was not the only one doing this work.

From the carts pictured above, I returned four to Wal-Mart and six to the grocery store. I picked up one more for the grocery store that had been abandoned outside a fast food restaurant in the shopping center. I didn't take a picture of that one.

I'm now taking the carts in trains of only four at a time. The rope proved to be less effective at steering the cart trains than I wanted it to be. Instead, I just wear hiking boots (to protect my feet from being run over by the cart wheels, which has happened twice now) and gloves (to protect my fingers from getting pinched and to absorb the vibrations from the wheels clattering over the cracks in the pavement).


On one trip back, I took a different route than the one I usually take and found these poor little carts, left alone behind a strip mall two parking lots away from their home store, forgotten in the shadows behind stores that simply did not use their rear doors very often. They looked lonely, so I took them home.

Again, I wasn't able to collect all the carts I wanted to, but I did make a difference.

This evening, as I returned home, I noticed that two carts had joined ten or so I had to leave at the dumpster. They were both colored. One was from the dollar store; the other was from the department store. I don't know if they were the same carts that I had earlier thought had been returned, but there they were. Regardless of how they got there, I was annoyed.

Sometime next week, I hope to return the rest.

Rescued: 10 Carts, Utah, United States

Because of some recent schedule changes, my cart-collecting expeditions are now happening just a little earlier in the morning. I've found that the people driving through the shopping center don't like to wait for pedestrians, let alone pedestrians pushing a train of shopping carts across the street, so I try to get my work done before too many people take to the roads. And the seasons are beginning to change, which makes the sun rise later. Part of this 90-minute cart session was in the dark.

It started simply enough. I found one of the local grocer's smaller carts sitting near a dumpster. It had been on the lawn the day before, so this was a bit of an improvement.

When I got to the main entrance to the apartment complex, I found two more of the little carts and a Wal-Mart cart at the head of this parking space. I also found two empty boxes (one for frozen food and one for cereal) hung on the tree as some kind of decorative tribute to laziness and apathy. But it's the next picture that showcases what I (voluntarily) had to deal with.

Yeah. That's not a hallucination. I don't have PhotoShop. That's real. That's nearly 30 shopping carts, all crowded around and behind the dumpster, and all approximately half a mile from their home stores.

Let me show this atrocity again from another angle. It's a whole line of carts of mixed origin, all unceremoniously smashed together and nearly all holding some piece of trash. The garbage collectors could not get the forks of their truck into the sides of the dumpster to lift and empty it. The dumpster doesn't fit in its little alcove either because of all the carts, which means that drivers have to dodge it and that trash is more likely to spill into the roadway.

I was appalled. I collected as many of these as I could. Because of an appointment this morning, I couldn't do as much as I wanted, but I did get a total of ten carts returned all the way to Wal-Mart.

The ten carts included this one, hiding in the bushes on the side of the road.