Rotting London grocery store sign
Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years: a peeling sign from the Islington Sainsbury's grocery store in London, warning shoppers to avoid entrepreneurial kids doing freelance shopping-cart distribution and pocketing the pound-coins used to release the cars from their pack-mule chains. The way that the sign is peeling makes the undistinguished typography look like the cover of a hipster zine -- and the text is a simple object lesson in the dynamics of security. Link
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I loath those stupid trolley locks so much that I started a Facebook group. If anyone wants to sign up:
"I hate those stupid coin-operated shopping trolley locks"
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8719389708
Why would they want to break the system by prohibiting the kids like this?
When I first saw the locks, I thought they were bloody stupid, yeah. But then I realized what was happening, and think it's an admirable, elegant, economic idea!
Look at the scenarios:
You put in a deposit, annoying, yes.
You shop and take the trolley back to your car.
You now have a choice of returning the trolley like a good citizen and getting rewarded for doing so or deciding not to bother, and just leave the trolley there. Is the walk across the parking lot worth 1 pounds worth of your time?
Now - a kid looking for pocket money can run over and fetch your abandoned trolley.
They can either take it back to the rack, and get paid for doing that useful job! Or they can 'sell' the trolley to another customer for the same price. Customer gets a trolley which is worth a pound to them on redemption, kid gets a pound to spend on drugs.
Surely this is win-win!
But it gets better!
How about those folk that take a trolley out of the premises and push it back to their housing estate? You now have an expensive trolley a mile away from home, and management don't have much chance of getting it back.
But A bored kid knows that if they take the trolley back, he'll get paid for doing so!
Trolleys will not get pushed into rivers or set on fire anywhere near as much if there is a clear cash value in looking after them.
The system embiggens itself!
Soo....
Why would the shop itself post a sign that tries to break that chain?
It can only be because they have an attitude against kids loitering, instead of treating them as free, helpful, labour!
... there may be a flaw in this system that I haven't seen, but that the way it looked to work when I saw it.
You can buy tokens, usually from a charity, which are the same size as pound coins and work just as well in a trolley. Personally I use an Isle of Man pound coin, which isn't legal tender on the mainland. One euro coins will also work in most trolleys.
Then again, as one of my friends did far too often, you can tip the trolley into the back of your van, take it home, and use heavy cutting equipment to extract the pound. I think that's the epitome of unreasonable effort for low returns.
Ah, my local Sainsbury's. A football pitch full of foodie goodness in the desert of Islington, assuming that you don't want to shop at the Sunday farmer's market or the Holloway Waitrose.
wow, what a bizarre concept. you actually have to pay to use a shopping cart in england? here in the states, you just grab one on your way into the store. In every row in the parking lot there are special places reserved to put the carts, and there is a person in the store whose job it is to round up the carts and bring them back inside.
SquirrelGirl - It's a deposit, not a payment. The trolleys are chained together and need to be released by putting a £1 coin into the lock. When you finish with the trolley, you're supposed to return it to one of the trolley parks. Reattaching the trolley to another parked trolley releases your coin.
It has become very common over the last 4 years or so. I've seen it a few times in France too.
I assume the idea is to encourage customers to returnt their trollies to the trolley parks instead of leaving them strewn around the car park.
Do you have locking wheels in the USA? Another recently common feature is a magnetic band around the car park perimiter. If you try to take a trolley over the band one of the wheels locks, making the trolley unweildy until unlocked with a special tool. It seems to be fairly effective as an anti-theft device.
I absolutely love trolley locks. 'Course, we don't call them that here in the US - in fact I have no idea what to call them. Bascart locks? (The technical term in the US is "bascart" though most people just call it "shopping cart." The Brits are definitely more poetic.)
Why do I love trolley locks? Because without them, the parking lots are riddled with abandoned carts. The poorer the area, the worse it is. My local supermarket parking lot is like an obstacle course because of all the carts.
They used to have trolley locks, and guess what? There wasn't a single cart on the loose. They were all neatly tied up, chained together, waiting for your quarter. They were also in better shape because they got hit a lot less.
I guess the other customers must have hated it or something because they finally did remove them.
SquirrelGirl, you get your money back upon returning the cart to its rack. There's a little chain with a "key" on it that when inserted releases the coin. So you're only out the money as long as you're using the cart. (Or if you refuse to return it.)
squirrelgirl: not all UK supermarkets have this system, some use the electronic breaks, most have no security.
It doesn't seem bizarre; it provides an incentive to put the trolleys back instead of just leaving them in the car park or stealing them to take your shopping home. I imagine in the US, where more people drive, the second problem is much less significant. If you rely on customers to return trolleys to the proper place without incentive, then some won't and they could roll about and damage cars, especially in windy areas.
Some British Councils make supermarkets pay for some of the cost of clearing up trolleys abandoned in the city. Since the trolleys have the supermarket's logo on them it's not hard to see who's responsible (other than the customer who stole it).
The system is much more prevelant in Europe than the UK, and 'lower-class' stores are more likely to have it too.
Pet peeve - put your freakin' shopping cart back when you're finished. I cringe every time I see a cart going across the parking lot on a windy day.
we had a shopping cart like system at the supermarket when i lived in new jersey. (more than 6 years ago...)
it didn't last long at all.
For a while we didn't have this in my city here in Canada, and then about five or six years ago the local no-frills chain introduced the trolly-deposit system, and a more upmarket chain introduced the magnetic locking system at all its locations in-city.
I prefer the trolly deposit system because if you're stuck paring at the far end of the lot, especially in a big shopping center, the stupid magnetic system invariably traps you and your groceries in the middle of traffic despite being still in the shopping mall parking lot and 10 to 20 feet short of the sign saying "THOU SHALL NOT PASS (with a trolly)" and 5-10 feet short of your car.
The store closest to us is attached to a full mall, and some bright spark decided to stop people from taking carts through the mall - of course, the store has exits into one side of the parking lot, but not the other, and the magnetic barriers stop all possible routes into the other lot.
No signs warn you of this, and the other lot is of course the only one that regularly has open spaces.
Incredibly frustrating for those of us willing to walk an extra couple hundred feet to return the cart, deposit or not.
I guess the black lettering is hydrophobic so water that drips into the white holes in the letters are trapped and slowly oxidize the surface beneath them to form those nice rust-colored spots. I guess the lettering is also bound to the sign better than the white background.
I like photos like these because they show aging of materials is so complex. When people try to produce aged or antiqued materials in video games, movies, or steampunk gadgets, there must be a great deal of thought involved in order to present it realistically.
I rarely see anyone putting a cart back. You just push the front wheels over the concrete curb of the nearest tree planter. Every half hour, the store sends somebody out to round them up. For carts that travel out of the parking lot, there are companies that drive around, pick them up and return them to the appropriate store for a monthly fee. I guess that expectations vary regionally.
A couple of the larger stores started to have this system a couple of years ago. The system worked very well. Then the government withdrew the $1 coin (due to too many fakes). The $1 is now a paper note. (I'm in Malaysia). So all the stores removed the trolley locks.
Recently, I saw one store that again started to install the trolley locks, but now using 20 sen coins. But then, 20 sen is about equivalent to US$0.05, the value is too low. :-)
#3, Simon, your friend do not need heavy cutting tools to remove that coins. The store staff have a special modified chain-thingy that you can insert into the lock to remove the coin. I had plans to bring a pair of pliers, or drill a hole into the coin where I could use a strong thread to pull out the coin. After all, the grip couldn't be that strong. Failing that, I was going to construct my own coin-removing chain-thingy. But the locks were all removed before I could do this. Now, if only I could remember where that new 20-sen lock store is, I can put my old plans into action. :)
BTW, most people are willing to walk about 5 to 10 meters to park the trolley, but not all the way across the parking lot. Some stores caught on to this, and have many places to put the trolley all over the parking lot, instead of just one or two near the entrance.