Municipal Shopping Cart Ordinances: What do They Do?

Shopping cart loss and the resulting loose carts throughout communities has triggered many cities and local governments to implement ordinances that place additional burdens on retailers to manage and retain their cart fleet. Some of these ordinances are over 3,000 words long. 

Most of these ordinances classify shopping cart theft as a misdemeanor, meaning that the actual punishment for individuals in possession of a retailer’s cart(s) is minimal or non-existent in practice. The burden of responsibility, and especially the financial burden, in these ordinances is normally placed firmly on the retailer.

These local ordinances vary from city to city but generally feature several components. Most do allow leeway to retailers to implement a “combination of solutions” to prevent and retain carts, so long as their effectiveness can be proven. Most of these laws feature components such as:

• Mandatory signage on premise warning customers not to take carts off property. Many localities also require retailer identification and contact information on each individual cart. This is often required to differentiate carts that can often look very similar.
• Containment of retention solutions. Most ordinances allow for a variety of options here. These can feature physical barriers at the store (gates, fences, etc.), poles on the carts, security guards, extra cart runners, coin lock systems, locking wheel systems, and “other solutions so long as their effectiveness can be proven.”
• Many laws require retrieval plans and partnerships. Some municipalities require a retailer partner with a contractor to retrieve carts found off premise. Others allow store employees to conduct this activity. Almost every municipality has a time window within which carts should be retrieved if found off property. This time window generally falls within 48 to 72 hours.
• Most ordinances require some type of plan be filed with the local office responsible for managing the cart ordinance. This often requires regular updates.
• There are almost always fees associated with the local enforcement arm being forced to collect a retailer’s carts. These usually trigger after a certain window of time has passed. This can often be a source of contention as most retrieval companies have no way of knowing how long a cart has been off property and generally collect them anyway. Most fees are also only assessed after a certain amount of carts are discovered/collected over a rolling length of time. This could be 5 carts within a 7 day window for instance. Fees and fines normally only come after this. The requirement around regular plans and retrieval mechanisms is sometimes only triggered by too many carts being discovered off property at once.

One of the difficulties retailers face with this ordinances is “proving” a solution works or not. Recent data by the City of Phoenix revealed that 50% of the carts they collected belonged to two local retailers. Within the city of Phoenix, those two retailers had locking wheel systems at over 66% of their stores. Over 75% of the stores in their jurisdiction that they collected carts from had retrieval programs in place. One retailer had containment systems at every location but one…and they still were the biggest contributor to the lost shopping cart problem. You can see a link to the data here for the recent public hearing on this issue. There is also a recording here.

Fortunately, there are solutions that allow retailers to verify cart retrieval effectiveness automatically and ensure any lost carts are collected before the fee window. These cart tracking systems also allow you to verify if carts were collected by the city prematurely. Cart Tracking systems like QuickTrack, also allow you to identify any common destinations for stolen carts, allowing you to stack offenses and potentially trigger felony thresholds for offenders. While tracking technology for carts is new, almost every ordinance in place allows for its use if paired with a retrieval effort...and many ordinances require a retrieval program.

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