The location of a tracked shopping cart in a metal scrapyard. We partnered with one of our...
Shopping carts are built for the long haul - literally. Many stolen shopping carts can travel long distances and quickly. Many times, these are pushed directly home. Other times, they are scooped up into trucks or trailers and driven away. These carts can quickly turn up miles away from the store within hours. Often, carts that travel long distances like this are associated with other criminal activity.
We tracked carts across several stores and analyzed carts that had travelled off-property.
In a random sampling of 10 tracked off-property carts, 5 of the carts were geo located at residential properties. Of those properties, 2 were associated with other offenses. What else did this stolen cart survey uncover?
In the sample of tracked carts, the average cart was located over 2.5 miles from the store. The furthest cart from the store was almost 7.5 miles away. Of the 10 sampled carts, 5 were at residential properties, 3 were at industrial sites, 1 was located at a Church, and 1 cart was located at another retail establishment.
None were at bus stops, or in camps. After reviewing the route histories of how the carts travelled to their current locations, none of these carts ever stayed at a bus stop or encampment along their routes to their current locations. Most went directly to their current locations or to an adjacent property.
As a retailer or municipality looking to tackle this problem, what does this mean?
- Good retrieval is more important than ever. Most carts in the sample were not in “known” cart theft areas. Quick retrieval and tracking data is paramount for recovering a majority of lost carts.
- 40% of the carts in our sample were likely scooped up by other vehicles, rendering locking mechanisms useless.
- The carts you see in the streets are a fraction of the problem. Most of the carts being stolen from stores are not visible by a casual drive around the block.
- Loss prevention can use cart tracking data to aid other investigations and better partner with authorities.
Both retailers and municipal regulations need to assess actual cart theft and loss data to make informed decisions on how to tackle this rampant problem. At Store Technology Group, their innovative QuickTrack GPS, Wi-Fi combination tracking technology provided the data for this article: QuickTrack can be used by retailers and authorities to recover carts and catch retail criminal activity.
