In mid-October, I went to the Price Chopper/Market 32 grocery store nearest my home on Madison Avenue, but I couldn’t find any shopping carts. I used a basket they had in the store that I hadn’t seen for a while.
I did my shopping. When I checked out, I asked the cashier. They told me the store had done some work on its entrances and exits. Someone had turned off the mechanism that locked the shopping cart wheels when the carts reached the parking lot’s perimeter.
As a result, many shopping carts disappeared. When I went shopping the next week, I found a single cart outdoors. As I finished my shopping, I passed along my cart to a customer seeking one. It took about a month, but they have been replenished,
Evening Press
I thought about this a lot because shopping carts always hung out on the street when I was a kid. When I had a newspaper route when I was 12 and 13, I often used the shopping cart. I never took it from the store, but they would always be available, like a community resource. That was probably the delusion of a tween.
One day, as usual, I was taking a cart to the pick-up point for the Evening and Sunday Press in my section of Binghamton, NY. Some guy stopped his car and said, “Oh, that cart belongs to our store. Do you wanna get arrested?” I said no, and I let him take the cart. In retrospect, I don’t know that he worked for the supermarket since there was nothing on the car indicating that. But by the time I reached the pick-up point, I had found another cart.
Cities now have abandoned cart regulations, which I reckon is a good thing. Albany has such legislation, but it’s been not as successful as hoped.
Speaking of crime, my Price Chopper store has had an armed security guard at the entranceway for about the last year. It startled me initially, but now I see the person and shrug. It does not make me feel any more secure—in fact, it is probably the opposite—but I know many other stores in the area have hired armed personnel.