Squeaky Wheel Greases Shopping Cart Bill

Neighborhood blight caused by stolen and abandoned shopping carts escalates as enforcement of the law prohibiting removal of carts from owners’ premises continues to be ignored.

Cart owners (primarily grocers) rarely, if ever, stop customers who leave their premises with a cart, and law enforcement will not cite violators unless there is a complaint from the grocer. As a consequence of this Catch-22 situation, I find no evidence of prosecution by the police or grocers for shopping cart violations.

The California Constitution permits cities and counties to enact and enforce ordinances related to shopping cart retrieval. California has 470 cities and 58 counties that have widely different environments affecting the shopping cart issue. Consequently, there is a proliferation of ordinances in which local officials can and do address the issue in proportion to the severity of their local problem.

Cart owners object to the multitude of ordinances and to the punitive nature of the ordinances when cities charge expensive fees for reclaiming abandoned carts. These circumstances have led the California Grocers Assn. to be the primary special interest sponsor of state legislation (AB 317) that preempts all existing and future ordinances regarding retrieval of shopping carts in our communities.

This bill, which was signed into law on July 25 and will be effective on Jan. 1, shifts retrieval authority from local control to the state and is contrary to current political trends. In this case, statewide regulation is another name for costly bureaucracy to aid and abet special interests. AB 317 does nothing to help stop the theft of shopping carts at the source. The Grocers Assn.’s answer to the blight of carts is to use AB 317 to protect its members from punitive charges and to escape the proliferation of local ordinances.

AB 317 was a weak bill and it is bad legislation because of its focus on streamlining cart retrieval to the exclusion of more forceful law enforcement. It seems to me to give tacit approval to continued theft of carts. The League of California Cities opposed AB 317 and points out that the legislation is unreasonable to the point of ridiculous in specifying that cities must give grocers formal notice of a found cart and then require the city to wait for three days before it can impound the cart.

It also removes grocers’ incentive to retrieve carts until the city tells them where the carts are. These and other costly and time-consuming administrative tasks in the bill ensure that abandoned carts will be on the streets much longer than under current local law.

In another action, the Grocers Assn. has devised a 12-step “Grocery Cart Removal Action Plan” that gives redundant and bureaucratic lip service to the issue. For example, the plan states: “The shopping cart will be picked up within 24 hours” (don’t believe it). But even so, this is not good enough--we don’t want the carts littering in the first place. Like AB 317, their softball plan has almost zero substance for stopping the theft at the source--their property. The added restrictions of AB 317 (the time-consuming formal notice and the three-day waiting period) serve to exacerbate the time that the carts will be on the streets.

The simple fact is that many of the cart owners and law enforcement are skirting the issue of head-on enforcement of current law. Self-interest seems to reign and, in the meantime, disgusted and angry citizens continue to face more neighborhood graffiti in the form of shopping carts. It is time to enforce existing law and let the perpetrators know that they can’t get away with oblivious ignorance and defiance.