Abandoned shopping carts are an eyesore
Nearly everyone has seen abandoned shopping carts junking up neighborhoods around Savannah. They are fourwheeled eyesores that suggest neglect and promote blight and decay.
It’s good to see that city officials apparently are taking a harder line on this ongoing problem. The city today is hosting the first of two public meetings to get feedback on a proposed new ordinance that would apply to merchants with 10 or more shopping carts in their inventories.
The issue of abandoned carts cluttering up the landscape is an old one. Four years ago, City Council addressed the same matter — first by sending letters to merchants asking them to take better care of their property and threatening to round up the carts and charging merchants a fee to get them back if they didn’t do more self-policing.
Merchants have little control over selfish or inconsiderate customers who walk off with their carts to wheel their purchases home, which is a form of theft that is typically not enforced.
Some merchants do a good job of patrolling neighborhoods around their stores and picking up stray carts that are left on sidewalks, curbsides or in ditches. Others don’t. That’s where the city comes in.
Actually merchants could solve this problem tomorrow. They could adopt the token-return strategy that requires consumers to deposit a quarter to get a cart and then returns the quarter when the cart is brought back to where it belongs.
That’s what the Aldi grocery store chain does, with much success.
Another fix is only using carts that employ an automatic wheel-locking mechanism when the cart is taken from the store property, rendering it useless to the customer and allowing store employees to easily retrieve it.
In Dallas, some merchants have gone the extra mile in apartment-heavy neighborhoods by installing cart corrals within certain apartment complexes to at least keep the carts contained until its employees round them up later. While that doesn’t eliminate the eyesores, at least it keeps them contained.
Also important is enforcement. When was the last time police officers arrested someone for walking off with a grocery cart? If the city isn’t serious about enforcement, it’s unlikely to solve this problem.
While abandoned grocery carts pale in comparison to the problem of violent crime, it is a quality-of-life issue that can contribute to neighborhood decline. But solving it could contribute to more important improvements, including reduction of blight, civic beautification and a healthy rebirth of neighborhood pride.