Cart Corrals Keep Wheelchairs Out of Supermarkets, Advocates for Disabled Say

For Karl Loose, grocery shopping means confronting an obstacle course of metal barriers--those devices many supermarkets use to secure carts.

“I can’t get in the store,” said Loose, who has used a wheelchair for seven years. “I have to wait to ask someone to get the manager to let me in the store. To me, that’s degrading.”

Loose and others are fighting back.

Many states already have building codes that require stores to have clearances of at least 32 inches at the barriers, often metal poles spaced just wide enough to be walked through without a shopping cart.

The problem is that such laws aren’t always enforced, said Marilyn Golden, a policy analyst for the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund in Berkeley, Calif.

“It’s amazing that that type of barrier is tolerated,” said Marsha Mazz, who chairs the Commission on Persons with Disabilities in Prince Georges County, Md. “It’s really a nightmare problem.”

Loose, 39, who used to shop at a store that had locked cart barriers, said the devices can be more than an annoyance to wheelchair-bound customers. They can also be dangerous.

“Once you’re in the store they’ll lock the gate again, which means if there’s an emergency you have to wait to get out,” Loose said. “It’s a definite . . . hazard.”

Loose, who lives in Pennsauken, is president of the Pennsauken Committee for the Handicapped, which campaigns for easier access to stores. He said he now does most of his shopping at a store without such gates.

“It’s a definite statement of exclusion,” Colleen Fraser, director of the New Jersey Assn. of County Representatives of Disabled Persons, said.

“You cannot shop there without preapproval. It’s a problem, generally, throughout the state,” said Fraser, who is also director of the Union County Office on the Handicapped.

Walt Ruball of the Philadelphia-based Acme Markets Inc. said the chain has replaced most locked cart corrals with new ones that allow wheelchair access but still prevent the carts, which cost about $120 each, from being removed.

“Our policy is not to have cart corrals unless they’re absolutely essential,” Ruball said. “We don’t want to inconvenience our customers.”

The new gates have been installed at most of Acme’s 294 stores, Ruball said. In the past five years, at least 20 of the older type have been removed, he said.

In Bergen County, across the Hudson River from New York, however, an advocacy group for the disabled has filed suit against an Acme market in Lodi where the new type of barrier has been installed.

The new design failed to take into account that most people who sit in wheelchairs sit on cushions, which add three inches to their height, said Steve Janick, executive director of Disabled Information, Awareness and Living.

That extra height prevents many wheelchair users’ shoulders from passing beneath the wedges atop the metal posts.

“Indeed, most of the chairs can’t get through,” Janick said. “Under this newest design, you either get in or not at all. There’s no alternate entrance way at all.”

The Clifton-based, nonprofit organization received 13 complaints last year about metal barriers at markets in Bergen, Passaic, Morris and northern Essex Counties, Janick said.

The group has pressured several supermarkets and department stores to keep cart gates open, Janick said. He added:

“Literally, what they’re saying is (that) a disabled customer is not worth as much as a shopping cart.”