Supermarket Puts Brake on Wayward Carts : An Electronic Barrier Locks a Wheel if It Crosses the Perimeter of the Parking Lot

Southern California’s battle for control of the wayward shopping cart is entering a new phase in a grocery store parking lot in Costa Mesa.

That’s where Lucky Store No. 604 is testing a device to keep the carts on store premises and out of streets, alleys and sight of aggravated residents, who have been trying for years to halt the carts’ travels around the area.

The metal carts, residents and public officials agree, are a hazard and a telltale sign of urban blight. They turn up everywhere from apartment building elevators to the Los Angeles River and are frequently seen in the company of the homeless, who use them to store and transport their belongings.

Cities around Los Angeles County have been grappling to find better tactics in the war against shopping carts. Lawndale recently enacted a law that declares abandoned carts to be a public nuisance and makes it illegal to remove a cart from the store’s premises or to possess a pilfered cart.

Other municipalities have tried to regulate recycling centers where scavengers often use carts to deliver materials gleaned from residential trash bins. Some cities also have hired crews to impound carts and collect a fee from stores for their return.

The abandoned cart “is litter, garbage; it detracts from Costa Mesa as a place to live,” said Joe Erickson, mayor of the Orange County city.

The California Grocers Assn. takes a kinder view of the roaming carts, arguing that they are a necessary form of transport for the goods of the poor and elderly.

“The cities don’t seem to care that everyone doesn’t have two cars in their garage,” said Don Beaver, president of the California Grocers Assn., who complained that some cities illegally collect stray carts and hold them for ransom.

The device that Lucky began testing this month locks one specially designed wheel of each cart if it passes an invisible electronic barrier at the perimeter of the store parking lot.

Lucky hopes that the impediment, along with stern warning signs that removing a cart from the property is a violation of state law, will prevent the daily disappearance of about 30 carts--10% of the store’s inventory.

The device may make its inventor and manufacturer, Actodyne General of Huntington Beach, popular with officials around the county, who have tried everything from fining store owners to hiring bounty hunters to retrieve the peripatetic carts.

The grocers association estimates that 750,000 carts are on the loose on California streets. The losses cost grocers about $17 million a year, Beaver said.

Los Angeles and the other seven counties in Southern California lost about $9 million a year on carts until about three years ago, when the grocers’ group started the nonprofit Shopping Cart Retrieval Corp., which pays people to pick up carts when residents report them.

The program has cut grocers’ losses in half, Beaver said. But the remaining carts are proving extremely difficult to retrieve because the people who use them--for toting laundry, trash or, in the case of one motor repair shop, for moving truck engines, Beaver said--simply don’t want to give them back.

“We have to have law enforcement help us sometimes,” Beaver said.

If the electronic system in Costa Mesa succeeds in a 13-week trial, Lucky Stores may install the device on carts at other stores in high-density areas, where more shoppers walk home with their groceries.

“Our object is to keep the shopping cart in the parking lot,” said Judy Decker, a spokeswoman for the Salt Lake City-based supermarket chain. “We will look at a number of things, including customer reaction and cost.”

Beaver said Southern California merchants are waiting to see how Lucky’s experiment goes before getting on the bandwagon.

During its first week, the locking wheel seemed to bother a few shoppers at the Costa Mesa store, but delighted many others. “What a clever idea,” said Janie O’Maley, who lives in an apartment building across the street, where dozens of shopping carts from different stores can be found any day.

Though she praised the carts’ usefulness, O’Maley said: “It got so you were tripping over them.”

One customer who said she used the carts to ferry home groceries found the new system a problem. Angelica Torres said she used to take seven or eight bags of groceries home in a cart when her husband had the car, but always returned the emptied cart promptly.

“For a few people [who keep or damage the carts], all of us pay,” Torres said as she waited for her husband outside the store last week.

Another woman said that, aside from having trouble moving a locked cart into the store, she welcomed the system--particularly if savings from it would lower her grocery bill. (Store employees have a hand-held device similar to a garage door opener that can disable the system if a cart becomes locked.)

“It’s a good thing if it is going to save customers money,” said Irma Hernandez of Westminster. “I expect to see it here,” she said, pointing to her receipt.

The new wheels have been installed on 64 of the store’s 300 carts. It’s the first test of the Actodyne system. If clever Costa Mesa shoppers are any indication, it may take widespread use of restraining systems to make them work. As Torres grew weary of waiting for her husband to pick her up, a friend arrived with a cart from a nearby Kmart store, loaded up the groceries and toted them to Torres’ home.

That saved Lucky one cart--at the expense of Kmart shoppers.