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Why are shopping carts always broken?

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Re: Why are shopping carts always broken?

#231

Post by hef19898 »

ccozan wrote: post #220
mk89 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Showing you what you got makes no money. Bombing you with dedicated ads for the 20-30 minutes while you're shopping... hell that sounds awfully brilliant!!

you guys rock :). Go make a startup or something...and I'll come with some money!

This whole thread turned into incredible brain storming, didn't it?

I am not asking a lot, but if someone rolls with it, please, please don't deploy it anywhere near me! :-)

Aside, this is why HN still is a a great place online!

Re: Why are shopping carts always broken?

#232

Post by DwnVoteHoneyPot »

xref wrote: post #59

At a Winco there was a box fan full of tools and parts parked at the end of the parking lot with a hundred or so carts in front of it. It was a repairman going through every cart, took several days as he made his way through all the carts at the store. Had never seen that before. Reminds me of summers spent working for the school district, replacing the glides on the feet of the metal tubed classroom chairs so the br…

I know a business that fix shopping carts. They don't repair at the store, they load up the broken ones onto a truck and take it to the repair shop. The repair shop is a part of large industrial parts store. It's very expensive for the shopping store to repair because it's typically a repair man who has some welding skills that fixes these things. Not sure why other people in this thread would think there is a specific person at each store who is going to fix these things.

Re: Why are shopping carts always broken?

#233

Post by sgerenser »

jmclnx wrote: post #199

>To combat this, grocery retailers in Europe, such as Aldi, Tesco and Lidl, have coin locks Where I lived, decades ago one store tried this. They ended up folding because no one wanted to deal with inserting coins, why: 1. What if you had no coins ? Most people in the US dump all coins in a big jar when the get home. I would guess back then, about 30% of the people never carried coins, so the chain instantly lost som…

Aldi does the quarter thing in the U.S. and I’ve never seen it as a problem. Just always keep a couple of quarters in the car (I rarely carry cash otherwise). I never see carts scattered around the parking lot there like I do at most other stores, despite it being only a quarter.

Re: Why are shopping carts always broken?

#234

Post by MBCook »

tzs wrote: post #32
MBCook wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A year or two ago my grocery store got rid of hand baskets. Now you can only choose between a short cart, a full cart, or holding everything in your arms. I hate it. They’re not bringing them back, I’ve asked.

Did they get rid of free plastic bags at checkout earlier? I ask because some Walmarts got rid of hand baskets. When they stopped providing free plastic bags at checkout there was a big rise in people carrying their purchases out in the hand baskets and then not returning the baskets. Those stores often decided to stop replacing the baskets. I would not be surprised if the same thing happened at other stores.

No nothing else changed. I suspect the idea is if you have a cart of some size they expect you’ll buy more because you can fit it or it looks emptier.

Some kind of psychological thing.

Re: Why are shopping carts always broken?

#235

Post by bookofjoe »

HPsquared wrote: post #184
chasd00 wrote: post #183

They get broken enough to be annoying but never broken enough to replace.

Lots of things exist in an "annoyance equilibrium" like this.

Great insight.

Examples:

Leaky faucets; squeaky cabinet/door hinges; door thresholds that let water inside only when it's a huge storm with heavy winds and rain; cars that only start after several attempts; my blog host which requires several failed attempts before uploading an image; grocery stores (Kroger and Harris Teeter, for two) that have only a single checkout line manned by a person — often new or old and slow — so as to "encourage" customers to use the many self-checkout stations; credit card readers that require several attempts before acceptance; gas station pumps which increasingly require more personal information before allowing you to put the darn nozzle in your car; phone and tablet touchscreens covered with fingerprints and skin debris and dust etc. but still quite usable; eyeglasses with the same issues; clothing you know isn't fresh but that's still wearable if the alternative is doing the laundry; running out of coffee beans and using instant as opposed to taking the time and effort to buy fresh beans.

I'm sure others here have equally amusing exemplars....

Re: Why are shopping carts always broken?

#236

Post by jtbayly »

xref wrote: post #59

At a Winco there was a box fan full of tools and parts parked at the end of the parking lot with a hundred or so carts in front of it. It was a repairman going through every cart, took several days as he made his way through all the carts at the store. Had never seen that before. Reminds me of summers spent working for the school district, replacing the glides on the feet of the metal tubed classroom chairs so the br…

I was trying to figure out what the box fan filled with parts was going to be for. Took way too long. Not enough caffeine yet today.

Re: Why are shopping carts always broken?

#237

Post by whiterknight »

blagie wrote: post #152
Yizahi wrote: post #140

Shopping carts are always broken because the store doesn't give damn. For instance in my current city giant Auchan store has literally every single cart busted, unmaintained and completely rusted top to bottom. Similarly sized Carrefour has normal carts, mostly without any issues, just like Ikea and several other medium and small stores. Kaufland even has some fancy new carts, which not only work fine but have some m…

You can blame one middle manager. You can't blame a million middle managers. If all middle managers are doing something wrong, that's a problem of org design. The same is true across the board. One corrupt congressman? Bad apple. 100 of them in a government? Something is wrong with the way the system is set up. One bad teacher? Bad apple. Most teachers are bad? You're looking at some issue with hiring practices, trai…

When almost everything is broken the organizational problem is in society.

Re: Why are shopping carts always broken?

#238

Post by whiterknight »

Yizahi wrote: post #140

Shopping carts are always broken because the store doesn't give damn. For instance in my current city giant Auchan store has literally every single cart busted, unmaintained and completely rusted top to bottom. Similarly sized Carrefour has normal carts, mostly without any issues, just like Ikea and several other medium and small stores. Kaufland even has some fancy new carts, which not only work fine but have some m…

Real answer: customers don’t give an damn and break and steal them.

Re: Why are shopping carts always broken?

#239

Post by consp »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #213
kapep wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would describe German drug stores in the same way (except that they don't contain a pharmacy and can't sell over the counter drugs). Smaller drug stores in big cities have a few small carts if any but often it's just baskets that you carry. Larger ones usually have carts. I don't think it's odd for them to have carts though, drug stores sell a lot of cleaning stuff which can be heavy and toilet paper which can fill…

> I would describe German drug stores in the same way (except that they don't contain a pharmacy and can't sell over the counter drugs) So, in the USA they are called "drug stores" because they sell... drugs. Prescription and over the counter. Are these really called drug stores, or using the German word for drugs, even though they don't sell them... because of their overlap with the non-drug business that the Americ…

Don't know how they are called in Germany but I guess it's similar as in the Netherlands: These "non drug" stores are called a "drogisterij" (and the English translation will be 'drugstore'), which is from a "chemist's shop" which in the past used to sell all kinds of stuff including medicine. These days the real drugstores are now solely called "apotheken" (pharmacies), I guess to distinguish them from each other.

There is some overlap with the two as the pharmacies also sell OTC drugs. edit: The pharmacy where I used to live as a kid was more of a drug store in the US sense with a pharmacy in the back, which also acts as the cashier, and the rest of the store was filled with all kinds of household products like beauty and cleaning.

Re: Why are shopping carts always broken?

#240

Post by asdaq1312512 »

jmclnx wrote: post #210
philshem wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Points 1 and 2: you can get a plastic or metal store-branded token for free from a cashier. Or many of us carry our own token attached to your keychain. No coins needed. Point 3: doesn’t make sense. The carts don’t have coins stored when they aren’t in use by a customer.

For # 3 -- Back the, some people would not bother returning the carriage to get their coin. They just left them where their car was and moved on. You saw this was decades ago :) For the plastic tokens, almost no one in the US (at least were I live) would deal with these plastic tokens. I very much doubt that would be accepted. Also we have deposits on bottles, most people here just toss the in the trash, not botherin…

> Also we have deposits on bottles, most people here just toss the in the trash, not bothering to return them.

It doesn't mean the system can't work. It means the deposit is way too low.

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