RAIDERS OF THE LOST CART : Duo Scour County for Stolen, Abandoned Market Baskets

They swooped into the supermarket parking lot, walkie-talkies in hand, just as the contraband was unloaded from a rickety red pickup.

“Got ‘em,” Eric Grossman muttered as he and Gilberto Cornejo moved in on the cargo. The contraband driver smiled weakly, walked away and sat on a curb under a tree, feigning indifference as the investigators picked over their haul of rusting, wobbling shopping carts.

“Target, Albertson’s, Food 4 Less,” Cornejo rattled off as he loaded the stolen carts into his own truck, eventually to be returned to their owners as far away as Los Angeles.

The stop was one among dozens Grossman and Cornejo made that day as they prowled the parking lots of independent grocers, alleys, apartment complex courtyards and other places where stolen and abandoned carts are found.

“Everyone wants a shopping cart,” Cornejo said, “but no one wants to pay for it.”

Four years ago, Southern California supermarkets were losing about $12 million a year to cart theft and facing a wave of punitive city ordinances aimed at clearing the rusting, wiry hulks off the streets, according to the California Grocers Assn.

Their solution was to form the nonprofit California Shopping Cart Retrieval Corp., staffed by investigators such as Grossman and contract truck drivers like Cornejo. President Bill Combs said the operation has cut market losses, but because no new surveys have been taken, he could not say by how much.

The cart cops do daily battle with people who view the $100 baskets-on-wheels as their property, from itinerant produce vendors to homeless vagabonds.

But the two said their major feud is with renegade bounty hunters who round up abandoned carts and sell them by the truckload to independent grocers, sometimes after grinding off or painting over identifying numbers and names and shipping the carts across county lines.

Though it’s rarely treated as a serious crime, such cart-running can be a lucrative--and dangerous--business. Cornejo, whose uncle started rounding up carts for Los Angeles markets 25 years ago, said he and other drivers have been shot at, threatened with knives and chains and punched over a load of carts.

“I’ll do what I can,” the father of three said. “But I’m not going to die over a shopping cart.”

Added Grossman: “When I got into this two years ago, I thought it was hilarious. The funniest thing I ever heard of. Now I know it’s serious business. A great deal of money is lost every year, and there are victims--the consumers.”

Grossman, a former reserve police trainee who has rappelled into canyons to pick up abandoned carts, supervises two contractors and their eight drivers, who return about 600 carts to supermarkets every day. The numbers soar on weekends, when shopping is heavier, and near the first of the month, when food stamps and government checks arrive.

Supermarket cart theft is most prevalent in high-density, low-income areas, where shoppers without transportation wheel their groceries home in “borrowed” baskets. Grossman said the sight of those carts clogging sidewalks and alleys--an irritating reminder of poverty in a wealthy county--has prompted harsh ordinances from San Clemente to Tustin.

“Orange County is a real political hot spot,” said Grossman, who has contracts to pick up all abandoned carts in Anaheim, Garden Grove, Westminster, Costa Mesa and San Juan Capistrano. In other cities, his drivers can only pick up carts of the supermarkets that fund the corporation.

Retrieving and returning abandoned carts is back-straining, work. “You’ve got to be in shape,” said Cornejo, “and you’ve got to have a lot of energy. The people who do best in this line of work have kids to feed, if you know what I mean.”

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The job gets trickier when people adopt their carts permanently, using them as laundry baskets, toolboxes, strollers, recycling bins or for any of a dozen other uses, said Cornejo, who has asked to use a phone or bathroom as a pretext for entering a business or home and search for stolen property.

Even more difficult, Grossman said, is tracking down altered “junk” carts, which are sold for $1 or $2 each to independent grocers who can’t afford to lose their own $100 carts.

As an example, he stopped by the Amar Ranch Market on Edinger Avenue, where a contraband driver happened to be dropping off a fresh load of mismatched carts. Even from a distance, he and Cornejo could spot the carts from their member supermarkets.

The driver, who gave his name only as Alex, said he’s paid about $30 per load and that no questions are asked about the origin of the carts. The weathered carts he delivered were parked separately from the shiny carts Amar bought new.

Grossman said shoppers who walk home are encouraged to use the old carts in order to cut Amar’s losses.

But Amar manager Nick Nikmanesh told a different story. “We are not stealing, we are only trying to clean up the area by picking up these old carts,” he said. “And we just leave them outside. If they [Grossman and Cornejo] want to come and pick them up, they can pick them up. We are not stealing.”

Nikmanesh said he’s as much a victim of cart theft as anyone. “The first of the year, I had almost 200 brand-new shopping carts. Now I have 120,” he said. “Somebody took 80 of my carts, and still they call me a thief.”

After consulting with Nikmanesh for about 10 minutes, Grossman and Cornejo drove away with six carts that clearly belonged to their member stores. “We’ll come back tomorrow and probably do the same thing thing,” Grossman said with a sigh. “It gets frustrating. You can get worn down real fast. But somebody’s got to put a stop to this.”