Heavy Meddle
Because there are no problems in California and there are dumptrucks of extra money rolling up every day to Sacramento, and because LA is in a similar position, our City Council members have taken on the problem of wandering shopping carts. No, this is not a piece from The Onion but from the LA Times op-ed page:
Now the City Council has unanimously passed, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has signed into law, an ordinance that will actually require all new stores with more than six shopping carts to include locking wheels -- or carts with tall vertical poles that bang up against barriers, or a grocery-lugging attendant, or some other way to ensure that carts don't end up on streets as a kind of portable urban blight. The Planning Department is under orders to study, as soon as any money turns up in city coffers, how to require existing stores to also keep their carts on the premises.Like a broken window that goes unrepaired, abandoned shopping carts are a problem and lend a depressing, transient air to a street. Any ideas about wrangling them ought to be considered. But really, a law mandating that stores erect barriers or provide carry-out service? Aren't there already too few grocery stores in many parts of town? Does city government really need to devise another reason for a company not to build a new store? City Hall should be making it easier and less costly to build and operate a market, not adding more burdens.
Besides, it's in the markets' best interest to police their costly runaway carts, and in fact it is the grocery chains' association that pays for those roving trucks that pick them up. They are better and faster at collecting carts than the city is at responding to complaints about other junk. Maybe we need to require locking devices on old couches.
I live in Houston. On my side of town an enterprising guy with a trailer drives around picking up carts from the street, apt complexes and the like. I am not sure how it works but he returns them to their stores for cold hard cash. Stores also have locking carts to keep the carts from being taken.
Ellana at May 21, 2012 10:43 AM
I guess ALDI's has a great idea for lost carts. They charge people a quarter to use a cart, then when you return the cart to the line, you get your quarter back. Very few people dont return the carts, and the few that dont are returned by people who want a free quarter. Works
Joanne at May 21, 2012 3:25 PM
They do the coin thing in Europe, too. At least in Belgium. There is a little device on the carts that lock one another together. In order to get your cart out of the stack, you have to put in a one or two euro coin that unlocks it (a lot more than a quarter). When you return the cart to the stack and lock it to the next one, it releases your euro. It's perfect. (here's a foil -- an American quarter works in there, too. That'll teach 'em -- muahahahaha)
That aside, I find the last paragraph of this post odd. How is this person arguing that the free market will work best to solve this problem? Apparently not in L.A. it hasn't. They're right that it's in the best interest of the market to police their carts, but they clearly haven't been.
I don't know how bad the problem is, but obviously it must be causing enough of a blight to get the law brought up and passed.
If I had a bunch of standing water in my backyard attracting mosquitos for the whole neighborhood to enjoy, it's obviously in my best interest to drain it. But if I don't, the city is well within its rights to come around and say, "Hey buddy, your actions are affecting the rest of us. Do something about that damn standing water." They also have laws that say if don't mow my lawn for months, bringing down the reasonable enjoyment of my neighbors property and affecting their values, I can be fined. There's nothing wrong with that and it's certainly not an example of government overreach.
That invisible hand is good for a lot of things, but apparently, in L.A. anyway, it's not so good at returning shopping carts.
whistleDick at May 21, 2012 4:07 PM
One more thing. This law doesn't seem to be too specific about how these markets solve their problem, it's just saying to the stores, "Hey, solve the damn problem. We're tired of your shopping carts all over the neighborhood making it look like a slum."
Again, I don't see anything wrong with this,
whistleDick at May 21, 2012 4:11 PM
The whole state of California is in the whole for billions of dollars. Most cities and counties are in the whole for millions. So the city of Los Angeles is going to pass a law fining stores, which are needed to fulfill Mrs. Obama's good food agenda, multiple dollars because their individual customers are jerks and assholes and take a cart off the property.
This is fining the cat food producer for little old lady's putting food out for strays and attracting more cats.
Jim P. at May 21, 2012 7:14 PM
"..."because their individual customers are jerks and assholes and take a cart off the property."
No it's not. Wheel locks don't prevent people from taking the cart off the property. They prevent the cart that the asshole customer hasn't returned to the cart corral from rolling out into the street.
It's attempting to solve a problem that negatively affects the larger community because the free market has, in this case, failed to solve the problem. This is the community using their government to solve a problem -- that's what, ideally, a government is for. If these carts were rolling all over a community that wasn't bothered by the carts, then the law would not have been passed.
whistleDick at May 21, 2012 8:59 PM
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