Carts should be making you money, not costing you money.

Cart retrieval, maintenance, replacement and city

ordinances can routinely cost a store $15,000 a year.

Carts live a hard life full of difficult work, theft and abuse. Once taken off your property, carts are likely damaged from improper use and exposure before they are retrieved at cost to your store. Cart retrieval and maintenance is a drain on store budgets driven by:

• Fleet attrition for an average store is two carts a week, either lost, damaged, or stolen. Losing two carts a week with 52 weeks a year at $75 per cart the total cost for a store is $7,800 a year.
• Retrieval services profit at your expense charging stores thousands a year to return carts. In 2009 Dave Reid estimated that he retrieved 65,000 carts in one southern California city, charging from $20 per load to as much as $4 a cart. (Source)
• Maintenance costs also rise as carts are returned damaged from exposure to offsite hazards.

Stolen and abandoned carts have become a public nuisance gaining the attention of State and Municipal governments. To halt the issue and recover funds spent on cart retrieval cities have turned to:

• A majority of US states have cities with abandoned cart ordinances ranging from fines for abandoned carts, expensive mandatory retrieval services, to mandatory cart containment systems
• City ordinance fines range from $25-100 per abandoned cart to some Cities suspending or declining to renew business licenses for non-compliance (Las Vegas, NV / Alhambra, CA)
• Cities have turned to heavy handed retrieval fees for carts collected by municipal services with retrieval fees costing as much as $25 per cart, often in addition to any fines levied by a city. Non claimed carts are auctioned off or recycled.

Carts retrieved by offsite collection providers often return damaged and missing carts impede upon the customer experience:

• Retrieved carts often are damaged being difficult to use or aesthetically marred decreasing customer satisfaction
• Missing carts during peak hours force customers to carry merchandise in smaller hand baskets or convenience carts reducing the amount of merchandise bought.