BANGOR, Maine — Pilfered from their home parking lots, they end up abandoned in ditches, on sidewalks, in parks and stuck in streams. Some Bangor City Councilors want to find a way to keep shopping carts where they belong.
This month, after receiving several complaints from residents about carts left behind in Bangor neighborhoods, the city’s public works department has started gathering them up.
On May 5, they recovered three. The next day four. On May 9 they found four more. Of those 11, three belonged to Hannaford Supermarkets and eight to Shaw’s on Main Street.
“I think what we really need to do is have expectations set of the businesses that have these carts,” Councilor Gibran Graham said.
Graham said the carts, left behind in Bangor parks and neighborhoods, contribute to blight and represent a public safety hazard. A wayward cart, pushed by the wind on a downhill slope, could cause damage to property or people.
The city manager’s office tasked Courtney O’Donnell, an administrative assistant, with looking into what other cities have done to try to reduce the volume of wayward carts. She reported her findings to the city’s Government Operations Committee on Monday night.
She found several examples from other cities that have tried to tackle the shopping cart problem. Some, such as Phoenix, Arizona, levied fines against companies based on the number of carts the city had to recover and launched a public education campaign. It saw the number of abandoned cart complaints drop from hundreds each month to about 135, O’Donnell said. Highland Park, New Jersey, has a tough ordinance requiring identification of all shopping carts, tasks the police department with removing abandoned ones, then charges the retailer a $50 fee per cart to reclaim the carts or cover the disposal costs.
San Jose, California, passed an ordinance that requires store owners be made aware of their responsibilities to prevent shopping cart theft and educate customers about the problem. Businesses with more than 26 carts per store were required to submit an Abandoned Cart Prevention Plan.
It’s a tricky problem, according to Councilor Joe Perry. He said he was hesitant to consider fines against the stores, because the city essentially would be punishing businesses for failing to prevent a crime of which they were victims.
“I don’t know what the solution is,” Perry said. “I think the problem is the people stealing and abandoning them, not the stores that are losing them.”
Councilors also said they wanted to avoid having the city’s public works crews devoting time and resources to gathering carts because that shouldn’t be the city’s responsibility.
City staff will work on an ordinance, likely modeled on one adopted in San Jose, and start discussions with local retailers about how to combat shopping cart thefts and improve recovery efforts.
Shopping carts typically cost a company $75 to $150 each, depending on how many the businesses buy at a time. Thefts can be expensive, so some shopping centers have started putting wheel locks on their carts, which trigger when they get too far from the business.
The carts that are rolled away have a way of ending up in places they don’t belong. Come spring, after the ice has cleared from the Kenduskeag Stream, carts that end up in the water are revealed at low tide.
In recent summers, Bangor City Councilor Josh Plourde and a group of friends have waded into or canoed the downtown stream, pulling out debris. Plourde estimates he’s pulled around 10 shopping carts from the Kenduskeag.
Abandoned carts have even become a medium for art displays. Bangor resident Cara Oleksyk sees a lot of abandoned carts during her commute between the Airport Mall area and downtown. On occasion, she gathers up some carts, brings them to Second Street Park, finds more carts that have been taken from the nearby Shaw’s parking lot, then stacks them to build sculptures.
Oleksyk stacks the carts, creating one or two “large” 10-plus cart installations per year, depending on how many carts she finds in the area. She sometimes puts canned goods in the carts, free for the taking by anyone who needs them.
“As someone who will walk home with groceries, I can see the allure of borrowing a cart,” she said. “It’s a problem when they’re not returned and end up stranded on a street corner or dumped in the river. I’ve called businesses and let them know they have carts out on the loose. I’d like to hope it’s easier on them when the carts have been wrangled in and stacked together.”
In some parts of the country, the shopping cart problem has led to new industries. The California Shopping Cart Retrieval Corp takes reports of stolen and missing carts, goes out into the surrounding area to find them and returns them to their rightful owners for a fee. They also have a branch in Nevada.
Local Shaw’s and Hannaford stores referred questions to corporate media relations. Shaw’s spokespeople did not immediately respond to messages requesting comment Tuesday morning.
Hannaford spokesman Eric Bloom said Hannaford doesn’t have data on how many carts it loses in its Maine stores. He said local Hannaford employees will visit locations where shopping carts are known to pop up on occasion to recover them.
“They’re not inexpensive,” he said.
He said Hannaford would be willing to speak with Bangor officials to find a workable solution.
Follow Nick McCrea on Twitter at @nmccrea213.