The unique nature of shopping carts makes them a valuable commodity for various reasons. [Shutterstock]
Quick: Name the most common items subject to being stolen. Perhaps your list includes cars, jewelry, cellphones, laptops and bicycles. But one thievery prize dwarfs them all—shopping carts.
According to theft-prevention company Gatekeeper Systems, nearly 2 million shopping carts are stolen annually in the U.S., resulting in $175 million in replacement and repair costs for grocers and other retailers. For context, about 1 million cars are stolen on average per year—that’s right, a Safeway four-wheeler might be more valuable than your 2025 Tesla. (Though that might be less of a surprise these days than it used to be.)
The lure of these metal cages on wheels are myriad: Unhoused people use them to transport their belongings; city dwellers without a vehicle are known to transport groceries all the way home with the trolleys. Some thieves even eye them for scrap metal. Whatever the reason, stray shopping carts often wind up in creeks, parks, clogging drainage systems or wreaking havoc in the middle of a busy road.
In most cases, it’s the responsibility of the retailer to manage the whereabouts of its carts, and some companies pay thousands per year in fines to municipalities or fees to vendors who round up the lost carts. Still, it’s most often cities and taxpayers who wind up on the hook financially for fishing the carts out of ditches and waste systems—and paying for their long-required 30-day impounding. Enter: State Senate Bill 753, signed into law in October, which removes a three-day waiting period for carts to be retrieved and authorizes cities to send carts directly back to store premises without impounding. It also raises the fine for each shopping cart recovered by the city to $100 (the max had previously been $50).
Whether those adjustments to state shopping-cart law keep the wagons in their wheelhouses remains to be seen. Supermarkets can have more than 200 carts at a store, while larger retail chains might carry twice that many. As author and products expert Edward Tenner told CNN, the value in shopping carts is in that they are extremely versatile and wholly unique—you really can’t get something like that anywhere but by taking them from a market. “There’s really no legitimate way for an individual to buy a supermarket-grade shopping cart,” he told the network in 2023.
Everything you need to know about shopping carts
- Shopping carts were invented in 1937 by Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Humpty Dumpty market chain in Oklahoma
- Goldman’s initial design was a “folding basket carrier”—basically baskets placed on a folding chair with wheels
- Shoppers were initially resistant to the carts—men supposedly considered them a sign of weakness; women confused them with baby carriers
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Sylvan Goldman is credited with developing the first shopping carts. - Humpty Dumpty hired models to push the trolleys around stores in order to normalize them
- The “nesting” feature, where the rear of the cart swings open allowing carts to be stacked in a train outside markets, was designed in 1946
- The child seat on the cart was added in 1946; the child’s seat belt in 1967
- The term “cart-napping” was first coined in a 1957 article in the New York Times
