CBC and the great shopping cart crisis
Over the holidays, the federal government informed us that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is in for a “redefinition” of its purpose and mandate. Don’t worry, Cbc-lovers: it’s clear enough that there’s no immediate threat of change. The heritage minister, in promising to consult Canadians on why we might need such a thing as a CBC, managed to confirm that she likes it just the way it is. And sometimes we feel the same way. Only an abundantly resourced public broadcaster with tendrils in every community could produce anything like CBC News’s panoramic vision of an overlooked national problem with abandoned shopping carts.
They’ve got a mind of their own, those things. Consider CBC Edmonton’s Jan. 2 piece on the shopping-cart problem in Alberta’s capital. Wallis Snowdon, an outstanding local reporter, writes: “Every year, thousands of carts stray from the store parking lots where they belong and come to rest in streets, alleys, city parks or deep into the wilds of the river valley.” Now, we have to admit: the “stray” unattended shopping cart that decides on its own to rattle off along the streets of Edmonton and plunge into a ravine or an underpass is something we haven’t witnessed with our own eyes.
But we’re assured by the CBC that such uncanny things are happening, and no other theory is suggested until the 24th paragraph of the story, when a retail-lobby spokesman first alludes to the fact that the wayward carts have actually been stolen from stores. At paragraph 30, a harassed retailer — whose grocery store no longer offers carts to customers at all — speculates that “people with mobility challenges” are perpetrating some of the thefts for lack of any alternative means of bringing the shopping home. Only then is she quoted as suggesting, with the utmost delicacy, that “the vast majority of discarded carts end up being used by people experiencing homelessness.”
Can this be so? Some of the CBC’S other local snapshots of the shopping-cart crisis reject this daring theory outright: in Thunder Bay, Ont., in 2021, an abandoned shopping-cart problem was attributed pretty directly to sociopathic cart-abandoning customers rather than thieves. (Side question: is the word “thief” gradually becoming taboo?) One way or another, many cities have adopted a blame-the-retailer approach, introducing bylaws that require grocers to implement expensive electronic cart-control systems or pay for abandoned-cart retrieval.
This is obviously not an uncommon or exotic method of addressing a pollution problem: you take the negative economic externality created by the existence of shopping carts and internalize it to the retailer. The problem is that shopping carts are pretty handy to have and use, and the stores might respond to the new costs by getting rid of carts or, more likely, passing the expense along at the till. Fortunately, it’s not like we have an issue with price inflation in grocery stores.
THE WAYWARD CARTS HAVE ACTUALLY BEEN STOLEN FROM STORES.
Edmonton doesn’t have any municipal policy requiring retailers to take responsibility for the carts they misplace, and its own retailers selfishly prefer that status quo. They don’t have much interest in reclaiming the thousands of wayward “stray” carts in the city, and a city parks spokesman helpfully explains why, observing that, “Abandoned carts are often filled with garbage (and) biohazards and may have drug contamination or residue.” It sounds as though life isn’t very happy for most of the carts that decide to “stray” from their fellows and wander off from the parking lot to explore freedom in the big city.