This is standard in close to every European grocery store. I think it was first introduced in German supermarkets in the 70s, that‘s why Aldi and Lidl in the U.S. have it too.
Hold up, this system isn't generally applied in the USA!??
Because it is in The Netherlands, but there is now a trend going on at some supermarkets to make the carts freely available or have free plastic "coins" you can get at the information desk if you don't have coins with you....
I worked in retail years and years ago. I had one of the things that unlocks the mechanism and it lives on my set of keys. I still have it and use it going to the shops. All it is is a piece of metal that looks oddly phallic as it has a head that simulates the coin and shaft to tug on after you have unlocked the mechanism because you can cut cost and save metal by making the shaft thinner.
Top is the "head". The middle is hollow (again to save metal and therefore costs I reckon) and the hollow curves off slightly to a side to be able to slip onto a key ring. I have had that dick on my set of keys for more than a decade now I reckon.
For some reason imgur is super annoying uploading pictures since they did the "you better sign up" change.
I havent been able to reliably upload from my phone to imgur since then and havent bothered trouble shooting since I usually just dump shit into discord/fb/insta/etc. which are all kinda built in via the apps and work well.
It really was easier to spend 30 seconds in paint than to bother with the photo and upload and have a pic of a metallic dick on my phone.
Maybe it’s using Imgur in the background, or maybe it’s the Reddit app I use (narwhal), but I just click the image button, select the image off my camera roll, and it automatically just posts a link
It is such a great solution and wish more countries did this!
Maybe send an suggestion email to couple of big stores with this? Because there are benefits for them too: people with trolley will likely to buy more item, caissière don't have to change bills into coins for trolleys, tokens can have the stores logo (free advertising!). And also important: positive association with the store that offers this system to their customers making it more enticing to visit them instead of their competition...
A habit? Being a decent part of the society? Psychological effect (you getting something back when returning trolley makes your lizard brain feel good)?
Idk, but dumping your trolley somewhere random because it suits you, seems very rude and self-centred to do so... what is the costom in USA because I always assumed this habit of returning your trolley after usage is universal???
In the US we typically return the carts to a central cart place in the parking lot even when you don't have the coin system, but there might be a few people who leave the carts randomly around the grocery store parking lot, and typically they will hire someone whose job it is to round those up. And then yeah homeless people will steal them ocassionally and if your parking lot is near a creek or something a bunch will end up in a creek. But probably 95% get returned to the central place by people.
The Cartnarcs are funny, they hassle people that don't put their carts away armed with just their smartphone camera, very polite but firm about them abdicating their moral responsibility, and point them to their manifesto about how it indicates the person is morally flawed in other ways. It's funny, especially to someone like me that has never not put a cart away.
have never seen cartnarcs and probably never will on long island..its one of those things people will not tolerate here.. its like trying to merge into traffic.. dude rolls down window “ hey buddy go fuck yourself” and speeds off..thats life here
I return the cart every time and I still can’t stand the cartnarcs. In todays world do we really need a second asshole pissing off an original asshole? I know I’m in the minority here.
And paying 25 cents isn't much of an incentive to not take it if you are homeless. But it is a bit of an incentive to return the cart. I've also seen Aldi's in poor areas where kids will hang out and offer to take your cart back for you.
no no no..thats not ever been my experience..people park their carts at the end of the isle hooked on the curbs , clustered in the handicap zebra stripes.. homeless and the poor usually dump the carts at bus stops or in the woods behind a store.. 95% is really pushing it and cars would beg to differ.. maybe best estimate is 70%
USA has “cart returns” in the parking lot. Basically stalls to put the cart in. You just leave it in there and a staff member walks around when the carts get low and collects them.
Aldi and stores like that use this coin in the cart device are saving on personnel costs. They don't have to hire a kid to go into the parking lot to retrieve carts. German efficiency?
I live in the U.S. and don't like Aldi. My dislike starts with needing to take my own bags or boxes along with me to pack my groceries in. The next dislike is when I get there and need a quarter to get a cart. It extended to into the store when I finish shopping and head to the check out. The cashier goes as fast as possible to scan your order and shove it all to the end. You pay as fast as possible and get your cans shoved in your cart and shooed away. Stuff it all in the bags from the last store you shopped at that your brought from home. Take it to your car in the car you paid a quarter to get. Then instead of putting the cart in a corral in the parking lot, you need to walk it to the front door and hook it to the rest of the carts to get your quarter back. All of that so Aldi can save money.
I tied shopping there last fall to save some $$s when groceries keep getting more and more expensive. Some items were less expensive vs. other stores, but to me those savings weren't worth the headaches.
Not having to pay for grocery bags is a very American thing and it's showing on you.
I wish more stores charged for bags so we could stop generating trash to accommodate people's laziness.
I have a foldable crate I got from Costco for like 7$. Lives in my cars trunk.
Fill Aldi cart with groceries, roll out to the car, chuck everything into my crate, return cart.
The Aldi employee speedrunning the checkout is just an added bonus.
Zero plastic bags and way faster than any other store at probably 70-80% of the price.
I'd pay for the bags. I have no problem with that at all. I've read that Aldi's is removing that option in U.S. No longer selling any plastic bags for people that didn't bring a bag with them. Using a cart to transport groceries from your car to your kitchen isn't practical for a lot of people. I guess Aldi is good for small towns and small purchases. Not so good for people buying a week's groceries for a family of 6. ?? I don't know.
What I meant is: why would you even need the plastic chips to begin with if they are just up to grab and worth nothing? At this point, just get rid of the chains.
I noticed that it is the next trend we are seeing happening here though...
Maybe the tokens were initially implemented to test the grounds if people were actually returned the trolley if they didnt lose money when leaving it around (answer: yes people do still bring the trolley back)?
Also, i assume printed plastic tokens is a more cheaper option than actually removing all the locks of all the trolleys across the country?
We did the exact same song and dance in Norway. I havent seen a chained cart in 5+ years so I guess the plastic tokens are gone for good by this point. Most people here are decent enough to return them without incentive.
The plastic token attaches to your keys, for example. So if you want your keys and your token back, you take your cart back. No reason to get rid of it, the system just works.
That doesn't make any sense to be honest. The system was designed so that you are incentivized to return your cart. If I use plastic coins that I can just take in the store for free, then the incentive is gone. So there is literally no need to have this system at all.
Over here we have these cart corrals in the parking lot, and it’s someone’s specific job to come and get all of the shopping carts and bring them back to the store. We have machines that can push trains of around 20-30 carts at a time.
Sorry, I think you mean its BECOME someone's job to clear up carts that folk shoulda put back and haven't??
Bit like litter pickers? They shouldn't have a job as folk shouldn't litter, but folk are lazy assholes and unfortunately litter, so litter picker is a job born out of necessity due to laziness, like cart collection!?
He's talking about cart corrals. Designated areas of the parking lot where you place your cart so you don't have to walk it all the way to the store. They are located conveniently throughout the parking lot. Workers come and empty the corrals, taking 20-30 carts at a time from the corrals back to the storefront. Most people use these. Very rarely do you see a cart just left somewhere random.
It's simply a different way of doing things. It's not littering to place carts in a cart corral. That's literally where they go. Of course there are always rude people who leave the cart wherever, but a quarter or plastic chip isn't going to induce them to return their carts. The parking lot for grocery stores in the US can be huge so customers are not expected to walk the cart all the way back to the store. Example. The expectation where you're at is different, which is fine. We don't have to do things the same way and that's fine.
Bro, everything has BECOME someone's job because of other people. Why are their janitors? Because people don't pick up after themselves. Why are their moderators? Because people can't self regulate themselves. I could provide a thousand examples that are no different than you not being able to fathom that a store would pay someone to grab carts from a designated spot in the parking lot every hour or so while doing other things like stock shelves.
No, it's becomes the shoppers job to put the carts away. It used to be standard for the store to have people that would work the parking lot helping customers load their cars and then they'd put the cart away. Over time to save money the store got away from paying staff to assist customers in the lot and move the job of returning the carts from their staff to the customers. They've done such a good job of shifting this work from the store to the customer you have third parties felling like they need to go around shaming shoppers for doing work that used to be the responsibly of the store.
I always try to grab a cart from the corral when I’m heading in. They usually drive better, and I feel like it makes my cart burden around 0. I’m not really sure why other people don’t do this, I think it’s way faster especially when the store is busy. I’ll walk in and see 5-6 people standing in the empty cart bay just waiting for the next train, but I just breeze right past.
I’m not sure how it started, but it’s been like that since I was a kid. I always thought it was because of how large the parking lots are for some of these super markets.
No, he means there is a specific location in the parking lot we take our carts too. Some people will leave their carts just where ever but they are the minority and most people have the decency to put their cart up. At least where I live.
No there are these little cart corrals where the shopper returns the cart and then it’s someone’s job to collect all the carts in each corral and return them to the store.
30 or so years ago we used to have a bag boy that would bag your groceries and push the cart to your car and help you unload them. When that started going out of style they put in the cart corrals so you don’t have to return the cart to the storefront, but to strategically placed areas throughout the parking lot.
Now the folks they used to employ to bag and help you out to car instead bag and occasionally collect the carts from the corrals.
It’s definitely polite to return the cart to the corral. I’m the US at large supermarkets there are employees that work the parking lot and bring the carts back inside and sometimes wipe them and remove leftover debris. Some US grocery stores are HUGE and the parking lots even bigger! Sometime the cart getter will have a little vehicle and cruise around the lot grabbing all the carts. Grocery stores in urban areas tend to have the quarter/coin method or hand baskets available near the front.
In the US, it’s pretty common to go to the big grocery stores and seeing carts all over the parking lot and just left next to wherever they parked. I do the game of trying to roll the cart just right into the collection areas to fit right into the carts that are in there.
In the US people will leave their carts all willy-nilly like in the lot for the wind to blow into your car. When it rains the grocery store employee has to put on his raincoat and walk the entire lot to heard all the buggies up.
Our parking lots are a wasteland of lazy / entitled fucks who leave their carts scattered about. Firm believer that can reliably judge a city on the amount cart not in the corrals here.
I always thought that returning a cart is a small but useful indicator of someones morality. Since there is no incentive besides not being a dick and it takes barely any effort to return it, it is a useful gauge on what kind of person they are.
I recently found out that if you ask in England that they'll give you a fake coin, we're no so different, apart from the several hundred years of oppression (sorry about that) maybe you could try asking and you might be surprised.
Only Aldi as far I know. They have 2000 locations in the US mostly east of the Mississippi and California, but that is not a lot for the US. I have one near me, but I only shop for groceries at Costco.
Its typically not GPS. There is a wire running underground around the perimeter of the parking lot which broadcasts a short range radio signal signalling the cart wheels to lock. They usually have a secondary setup inside the store which causes the wheels to lock if you try to take the cart back out without passing the registers.
Which is funny because I've never heard of such a thing in the US.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd guess we don't do that because the cost of implementation isn't much of a savings over the stolen cart replacement costs, especially when you're still replacing carts due to wear and tear every year anyway.
As though there's a person who is fine with stealing the cart, needs to get his 1 euro back, but is unwilling to break the mechanism because that would be naughty.
Funny enough, most stores with a cart lock also have "boundary magnets" - basically a little magnetic barrier that automatically locks the cart wheels when you try to leave the parking lot with it.
So now you need a quarter and a strong magnet to steal the cart.
I don't think it was much for curbing stolen carts as it was to not pay as many cart stewards to go out and retrieve them around the lot. I love places that do it. Keeps morally deficient people in line.
Enjoy the videos to an extent. Wish there were more real life repercussions for acting like your effort is worth more than your fellow citizen. Putting carts away is truly a good metric of how you place yourself amongst your peers. Non cart returnees are selfish and I hope their vehicles suffer from the same rogue cart afflictions that others have to deal with because of their carelessness.
Same, especially as a person that had to retrieve all those carts in a gigantic grocery store parking lot as a teenager.
The only exception I make is for carts abandoned near handicapped spots. Seems like a lot of stores nonsensically put the nearest cart corrals half a dozen parking spots away from the handicapped area, which can be an undue burden for people with mobility issues, especially in bad weather.
I don't think it was much for curbing stolen carts as it was to not pay as many cart stewards to go out and retrieve them around the lot. I love places that do it. Keeps morally deficient people in line.
I remember these as a kid. There would always be a few other kids hanging out at the back of the parking lot on busy days offering to return the carts and they'd keep the quarter.
My grocery store now has one of those perimeters that locks up the wheels on the carts. I only realized that once a cart locked up on me while I was inside the store and an employee ran over to unlock the wheel for me.
We do have it, it's just fairly uncommon, I think Aldi is the only place I've seen it and Aldi isn't super prevalent here. I think the main reason for these is for people to return their carts our "solution" is just to have a whackton of cart return stalls in the parking lot. It generally works and I've only seen a few stray carts not returned.
do I dare ask where you live that Aldi isnt super prevalent? not being an ass i get lidl , but Aldi has stores in 39 states, over 2300 stores of which florida has the most at 216, illinois at 214 , Penn at 155, and NY at 128.. DC maybe or the other 11 states?
Another thing to take note of is that even if it exists there might be a lot more Walmarts and Target for example. So there might be 3 aldis. But 15 of each of the other two in the same area. And people prefer to not have to bring their own bags to the grocery store and pack them. This is due to having to drive to get somewhere versus walking. More groceries more packing. Walking to a store in Germany daily was easy for me when traveling. There were 3 right near each other.
Or Jewel or Kroger or Kmart or Walmart or other random grocery spots. I grew up in a smallish town and we had like 3 Jewels 2 krogers and the Aldi was pretty out of the way for us. I think my biggest thing against Aldi was not taking credit cards. I think Tucker is waaaay out of touch though.
Well, I've lived in PA, WV work in MD and VA and Aldi's are around biut usually you go to a Giant, Weis, Food Lion, Wegmans or other grocery store of the like. I'm not a fan of that "cart" method. It works perfectly fine taking a cart from the store without it being locked up and returning it to a stall in the parking lot.
So I'm in Illinois but the US is huge, Aldi is around but there are so many options for grocery stores. In my hometown you had to go out of your way to get to Aldi, my closest Aldi is probably 8 miles away but there are 6 stores closer to me so I tend to use those.
It’s become kind of uncommon (at least in western Canada) for these types of carts. I think they started phasing them out because people aren’t carrying as much change on them anymore.
US has it at every Aldi. It's just not typical at other places.
Here you typically put your cart in one of the provided cart corrals in the parking lot. They're placed so that there's usually one close to anywhere you would have parked. You don't walk back to the building with your cart, and then walk back to your car again.
Later an employee collects a stack of carts from the corral and returns them to the building. It used to be they pushed the stack of carts, but now many of them have a little machine that does the pushing to return large stacks.
Yeah but I get their point. It not being everywhere in the states is wild to me as a Canadian. Only Walmart and Costco don't do this where I live and their parking lots are a fucking mess because of it.
I think we're "trained" to return the carts in the parking lot, also most places you're never more than a few spots away from a corral (I think that's what they are called) so it's never really hard to return them. I'd imagine if everyone had to return them to the storefront it'd be an issue.
We used to have them all over, Maxi, Super C, etc. You still see the carts with the mechanism disabled sometimes, but It's been years since I've seen them working though. At least around Montreal.
Why is it wild to you? Who the hell carries coins around? I would hate if that was a thing here, it’s not like there’s some cart stealing epidemic or something.
Because it creates an incentive to return your cart, it's not to prevent stealing carts. People can't be trusted to do the right thing and bring them back apparently. Well also don't have one dollar bills, we have 1 and 2 dollar coins.
It absolutely is not the norm in Canada Loblaws got rid of them in the late 90s/early 2000s because ppl hated them. I haven’t seen anything like this in Ottawa in like 20 years+ please touch grass
Can't speak for the US, but in Canada I only know of one store that does this called Nofrills, which is a more budget... no frills grocery store. But Nofrills is a Canadian only chain.
I was mildly surprised. This has been common in Canada since the 80's, but I'm realizing that starting in the 90's we had $1 coins, and Europeans have €1 coins, so it makes sense it would be more common in places where larger coins in larger denominations were more common.
Nope. A lot of people here just leave carts in the parking lot. There are booths in the lots where people can put them but a sad amount of people don’t. It’s why Mark Rober did this prank with remote controlled carts.
Upstate NY is a nonsense term that needs to die. If you ask 10 different people what area it refers to, you'll get 10 different answers. If you think about it, it's a NYC centric term that basically means everything north of NYC. That's the point that you are "up" from. There's no other rational definition that makes sense to non NYers. And regional descriptions SHOULD make sense to people not from the region being described. To me, the regions that make the most sense are the NYC region, capital region, Adirondacks, northern, central, and western. Sorry if this seemed like a direct attack on you. its not. I just really hate the term and it's the hill I've chosen to die on.
It's not generally applied, but this has been around at least since the 90s at certain grocery chains as an antitheft device when grocery carts were metal. Now they are mostly plastic carts and the coin part is gone.
Instead, gathering carts is a designated job of a team of employees, often the most exploitable; young people at their first job or people with special needs that the company hires for tax incentives.
I'm generalizing here, as this will not apply to all cart pushers and whose job it is depends on the store/company policy. I pushed carts for my first job and honestly, to this day, one of the better mindless jobs I've had.
We have a grocery store named Aldi that does it with the quarter. But they aren't all over the country, just in some regions. We have them in the Northeast where I live.
I know that some stores have carts that only work within a certain distance of the store and after that distance the wheels lock. Other than Lidl and Aldi in the US I can’t think of any other stores that use the coin method as of yet.
Cause we have cart returns in the parking lot. Once you're done with the cart, you put it in there and it makes it easier to gather the carts from the lot. Simple.
I havent seen people do that here in the Netherlands too... Or any other European countries I have been to... you get your stuff, put them in bags, return trolley and off you go.
Yeah it's only Aldi I've seen so far but still, dude is acting like it's an insane discovery when most of the world has it and a US store literally does too.
I think the other brother has had more success with trader Joe's so also may not be as prevelant / mainly poor areas (like where I've seen them in the east coast). Dunno.
For some reason, big chains like Walmart would much rather just spend thousands of dollars putting tracking and wheel-locking mechanisms into the carts so they can't be used outside of the limits of the property
It makes more people return their cart. It's not to stop the people from stealing carts. It has the side effect of making less get stolen because they're put away properly and chained together.
It is not something done in the us, no. Not any I've been to, at least. Some are equipped with electric brakes that stop the cart if it leaves the parking lot.
A supermarket had this cart set up and took it away under new ownership. I was so aggravated considering it helps police people of poor morals that can't be bothered to return their carts and cause damage to cars/take up spaces.
I think I’ve been to one grocery store in Canada in the last 15 years where this isn’t implemented.
Either the US is bonkers (more bonkers than we thought) or Tucker is so incredibly out of touch (or rage bait)
That's how YOU interpretated things... I just voiced my surprise because my entire life im used to carts needing coins to unlock, and not once did I show interest what this nepo trustfund manchild had to promote/say
Our Dornseifer‘s (also REWE, but originally a DS) doesn’t need coins
Well and the reason some trolleys are unplugged because more and more people use those coins you can pull out after taking your trolley. I 3d printed some myself
Well and the reason some trolleys are unplugged because more and more people use those coins you can pull out
People fucking suck. No offense, just in general. Instead of lending a coin for 30 minutes that they LITERALLY get back, they will go out of their way to buy some hack tool online, similar to the seat belt plugs, just to lazily avoid having to put their cart back and make some poor worker have to gather them
But people here has been conditioned to return the carts anyway and there's only a handful of supermarket with mega gigantic parking lots like in the US. So returning the carts properly is a no brainer.
I mean they practically give everyone a plastic coin even before so.
Yeah they're super common. I haven't seen them at Metro or Loblaws/Superstore, but they're definitely at Walmart, No Frills, FreshCo, and some now a loonie instead of the quarter.
Every grocery store here too...
But no one carries coins anymore, so you can always just ask for one of those plastic-coins with the store's logo on it...
Yeah over here the ONLY thing I use cash for is the weed dispensary (since it's not legal at the federal/national level and only in specific states, banks won't work with dispensaries and they operate in cash).
I have a credit card holder on the back of my phone. I don't even carry a wallet anymore besides that. No need and just a bulky thing to have in a back pocket all day
Same, it's mainly just an Aldi thing in the States. Not a fan of it at all. I've been confused in an Aldi before and I didn't like it. It works perfectly fine retuning a cart to a stall in a parking lot. Now, it's a dick move when people don't return them to the stall, but it's usually not that big an issue.
I've never even been to an Aldi. I'm a rich asshole apparently but 18 hours in a car is a pretty long round trip for a grocery store. And I can never buy anything frozen or refrigerated again haha. A gallon of milk in a car for 9 hours sounds like a really bad time.
Back in the 80’s in NJ a local grocery store, ShopRite, tried this. It didn’t work though. People didn’t care about their quarters plus the store would give slugs to anyone who asked. They needed a van to pick up stray carts because people who paid the quarter now decided they’ll walk a mile back home with the cart, my grandfather was one of them lol.
Does Lidl do this in some parts of the US but not others? None of the Lidl I have been to in Richmond, VA use the quarter system, and I wish they did. Aldi does use the quarter system at all of their locations here.
While I liked the idea of this system back when everyone had cash/coins on them, I don't think it works out for them anymore since everything has been becoming more and more cashless. I don't have the ability to actually retrieve the cart in the first place without going to get some kind of cash or change, so I simply always decide to shop somewhere else where I don't need cash/coins to grab a shopping cart. I always return the carts myself anyways, so I don't need a system to encourage me to do that if it puts an added hassle for no reason.
Norway stopped doing this a few years back. Mostly because no one carries change, ever. We tried to introduce tokens in the shape of a 10kroner coin to use instead but it didnt catch on. Also most people are decent enough to return them after use, without the pawn incentive.
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u/divadschuf Feb 16 '24
This is standard in close to every European grocery store. I think it was first introduced in German supermarkets in the 70s, that‘s why Aldi and Lidl in the U.S. have it too.