You see them all over the city, abandoned on sidewalks, congregating at corners, urban ruins of wires and wheels. They often appear mysteriously overnight. One could be forgiven for wondering if shopping carts are just born on the side of the road.

Shopping cart theft is a big problem for stores. They cost around $175 each, so having that walk off on a daily basis is a substantial loss to markets. On the Eastside, Trader Joe’s, Rite-Aid, Petco, and Fresh N Easy carts reside on sidewalks throughout the neighborhood. In West Downtown the carts are often from Office Max and Smart and Final. Homeless sometimes procure them after abandonment, and use them to transport cans for recycling and personal possessions. Sometimes abandoned carts just catch urban flotsam, like this one, serving as a temporary clothing rummage bin:

Shopping carts were designed for the suburban family. You drove to the large supermarket to do your weekly shopping. Convenience reigned as you pushed your shopping cart down the aisles. That cart clearly needed filling, encouraging you to knock out all your shopping in one place. A helpful clerk would load your purchases for you in your auto. Shopping carts were a necessary part of store marketing ambitions meeting shopper needs and psychology.
Emerging demographics and smaller parking lots have changed shopping cart usage. You still trolley them around in the store, but now also they transport the purchases to a car parked on the street, bus stop, or home sans car. When you’ve reached your destination, unload the shopping cart, and leave it there on the sidewalk. Someone will collect it.
Indeed, someone does. In the City of Santa Barbara, you can call the Shopping Cart Hotline at 1 (800) 252-4613 to have one picked up. A company called CART administers shopping cart retrieval for the city. Stores pay for CART to run a flatbed truck through shopping cart congregation hot spots. CART loads the carts up, and returns them to the store of origin.

Not all markets are enrolled in the CART service, so the city pays around $3 per cart for the non-signed-up businesses when carts are called in to the hotline. Public Works then stores those carts on a city lot and calls businesses for pick-up. They’re very polite about it.
Sometimes carts end up in sad states. Neighborhood clean-ups have pulled them out of creek beds.
Some stores have taken steps to deal with cart theft. Santa Cruz and Ralph’s carts lock when you try to leave the parking lot with them. Tilting the cart up over the barrier line can subvert the system. Some people also manually disable the wheel locks. CVS carts can’t even leave the store – a big metal pole in the cart hits the door on attempted exit.
Ventura now requires every store to install a full cart theft-prevention system, and those cost up to $40,000, no small expense. Further, stores must sanitize carts returned to them after paying the city a fee to cover retrieval costs. Ventura has a hotline too, and expects to be reimbursed for retrievals. They can also fine stores if they retrieve a store’s carts more than 3 times. If you don’t bother to pick up your retrieved carts, the city can sell off or destroy them as it sees fit. That’s a lot of penalty for stores for theft of their property.
Shopping carts now fill a temporary need to ferry things from the store to another destination, even if that wasn’t their original intent. A social contract is being broken when people take off with a cart and then abandon it on the sidewalk. Theft is hard to prove, as someone could easily say they found the cart. Two people moved in Sunday night using an abandoned shopping cart to ferry furniture up the street. On the other hand, a $1,000 penalty for pushing a shopping cart on a sidewalk away from a store would probably cause people to avidly avoid being seen anywhere near one off store property.
If we truly need temporary pedestrian haulage capabilities nowadays, these look adequate for the job, and come in different colors. The first one is $29 on O.co:

Why not buy one, instead of taking shopping carts from stores?
Los Angeles’s cart retrieval costs that city some $3.9 million per year. Their ordinance has generated some controversy. Who’s to blame, the store, or the cart thief?
It’s an odd state of affairs for a shopping convenience that was once fairly innocuous. But another one of those conveniences, plastic bags, just got banned, so maybe it’s just a sign of the times in crowded, coastal California cities.