Could I make a little gun and just walk around through the parking lot and aisles of the supermarket and freeze all the carts in place?
Could I make a little gun and just walk around through the parking lot and aisles of the supermarket and freeze all the carts in place?
What’s interesting about these carts is that they only ever seem to be deployed at stores that I wouldn’t think were prone to cart theft, to begin with. They’re always in the nicer neighborhoods at the overpriced stores that nobody should be shopping at in the first place.
Meanwhile, every cart at the stores in the worse neighborhoods look like they’ve been used as target practice for an M1 Abrams tank, have no locks, and can be found scattered on random street corners for a 3 mile radius from the store.
Retailers in wealthier areas have larger budgets, higher profit margins, and more attention by the executives. The favorite managers get assigned to the better stores and regions because obviously it involves better bonuses and better quality of life. They then invest in bullshit security upgrades because they can, and the C-suite believes they work because, well, the managers saying they work were already the favorites.
Retailers in lower income neighborhoods literally can’t afford long-term investments - corporate runs them on razor-thin margins, assigns them the worst managers by default and doesn’t trust those managers, and underpays their staff such that they’re constantly dealing with turnover.
Even if they found the temporary budget to install the security measures, they would still need a permanent budget to maintain them, and it still wouldn’t be worth it because:
One of the proposed features is locking the cart if someone is about to walk out without paying.
The cost of the RF locking wheels isn’t far off the price of a replacement cart. (Not to mention the investment in digging up the entire outline of the lot burying the line.
Because the former location just virtue signal, the latter can’t afford to lose the majority of customers.