Roundups Rise as Shopping Cart Rustlers Irk Cities

Miguel Pineda watches the streets like a hawk, scanning Anaheim’s alleys and avenues until he spots his prey: those stray shopping carts that clutter neighborhoods.

He starts early in the morning to avoid heavy traffic, and his handy technique for getting a cart onto the back of his flatbed is to pop a wheelie with it.

Pineda works for Hernandez Cart Service, one of a handful of businesses whose sole mission is to recover abandoned grocery carts--roughly 6,000 or 7,000 a day in Orange and Los Angeles counties. The company, which works under contract with retailers, is now seeing demand from city governments--in Anaheim, Santa Ana, Culver City, Inglewood--that consider the abandoned carts an eyesore and sidewalk nuisance.

“You’re never finished,” said Enrique Hernandez, owner of the Venice-based collection service. “You can clean up this area, stay here all day, then tomorrow it will be the same.”

The state’s largest service is California Shopping Cart Retrieval, a nonprofit founded in the early 1990s by major grocery chains, which were losing millions of dollars’ worth of carts annually. The company projects that it will pick up 6.1 million abandoned carts this year.

The company serves more than 1,900 stores statewide, but officials in some cities say that is not enough. Seeking faster, more responsive service, they are turning to companies such as Hernandez’s, which last month signed a $48,000 annual contract with Anaheim. The company’s job is to supplement retrieval by the statewide service and cover small stores that may not be part of the umbrella group.

What the city gets is more focused service from workers such as Pineda who are out every day picking up abandoned carts.

Anaheim had been testing the service since September and decided to formalize the arrangement because residents’ complaints were declining as fewer abandoned carts were seen on city streets, said Roger Bennion, code enforcement supervisor for the city.

“People take carts home and leave them in the public right-of-way, and it’s a blight to the neighborhoods,” Bennion said.

Now, when residents have complaints, the city can respond in an hour or two. Carts with retailers’ logos are returned to the appropriate stores; all others are taken to the city yard and destroyed.

The Costa Mesa City Council is considering a similar solution, discussed in last week’s meeting.

Stores have a financial stake in keeping the carts, which cost an average of $125 apiece, said David Reid, executive vice president of California Shopping Cart. The state’s major supermarket chains spend $8 million annually in retrieval costs, he said.

Retailers understand that shoppers who walk to stores rely on the carts to carry their groceries several blocks or even miles. “They need some way to get their groceries home,” Reid said. “For the grocery industry, if you restrict that, you’re restricting some of your sales.”

One such shopper is Maria Flores, who regularly loads a cart with groceries from her neighborhood Vons and items from the nearby 99 Cent Only Store. She ignores the placards warning that taking a cart off store premises is a crime.

“I don’t have a car to shop, so we come to take the shopping carts,” Flores said as she set off for home, four blocks away. “I leave them at the apartment complex.”

Others use the carts as child strollers, recycling collectors and laundry baskets. Some homeless people use them as suitcases.

“There are areas where the shopping cart is a commodity,” Hernandez said. “They just keep the shopping cart as a piece of property, and when the store gets new carts, they trade them in for the new ones.”

Over the years, stores have tried many tactics to hang on to their property: charging customers a quarter to use a cart, burying an electronic device around the perimeter of a store parking lot that causes a cart’s wheels to lock up.

“The stores, they have done their part,” Hernandez said. “They try. But they give up when they start losing customers.”

To report abandoned shopping carts, call California Shopping Cart Retrieval, (800) 252-4613; or in Anaheim, Hernandez Cart Service, (888) 233-2278.