Abandoned shopping carts are found around Hollister
They can be found throughout Hollister, turned over on empty
lots, stuffed with recyclables, abandoned on the side of the road.
They are shopping carts, which serve many more purposes than were
originally intended and are considered by many a blight on the
landscape.
Abandoned shopping carts are found around Hollister
They can be found throughout Hollister, turned over on empty lots, stuffed with recyclables, abandoned on the side of the road. They are shopping carts, which serve many more purposes than were originally intended and are considered by many a blight on the landscape.
The removal of carts from local stores does not just create an eyesore, however; it is an expense that adds up for businesses.
“It is a problem,” said Jimmy Costillas, manager of Safeway on Tres Pinos Road. “And it’s getting worse. Some of it has to do with the economy, but most of it is people using the carts to get their groceries home because they don’t have transportation.”
Each Safeway cart costs approximately $300 to replace, Costillas said, noting that 20 missing carts were not recovered last year.
Safeway and some other stores contract with a San Jose cart collection service that comes to town once a week to gather abandoned carts, and many store managers report that when they get calls from customers reporting abandoned carts, they will go pick them up themselves.
Some recovered carts have been missing for months and are too dirty to be re-used by stores, meaning they have to be replaced.
Jim Gibson, co-owner of the two Hollister Super grocery stores in town and Windmill Market in San Juan Bautista, said his stores lose between 35 and 40 carts per year, while many others go missing and are later recovered.
“We find them all over the place,” he said. “Myself, my business partner, our store managers, our butchers, we all go pick them up. I once got a call from the state park in Felton saying one of our Hollister Super carts was up there. I didn’t even go get it.”
Like others, Gibson will not put back into service a recovered cart that is excessively dirty or damaged.
Smaller, double-decker carts purchased by his stores proved to be too popular, Gibson said.
“We bought 50 of them and lost all 50 of them,” he said. “They’re small enough that you can use them in the garage.”
Most of the carts that are taken from the parking lots of shopping centers are abandoned after the shoppers reach their home or apartment, Gibson said.
“There are certain apartment complexes and other spots where people tend to drop them off,” he said.
Hollister Code Enforcement Officer Mike Chambless said the city used to run a program in which it would document the location of missing carts, notify stores in writing where the carts were, give those stores a few days to retrieve the carts, then go back out and verify if they were recovered or not.
“The laws dealing with it are a bit time-consuming and at this point I’m leaving it up to the store owners,” said Chambless, noting that the city ceased the cart recovery program in November 2007 because of staffing shortages.
Any abandoned shopping carts were stored in the city yard and the businesses to which they belonged were billed for the recovery and storage.
“It was $10 to find them, $56 to remove them and after the third time the business would receive a $50 fine,” Chambless said. “Oftentimes the stores wouldn’t pick them up.”
From May 2006 to November 2007, Chambless said he dealt with approximately 500 abandoned carts. Since adding management of the Hollister Airport to his code enforcement duties, however, the cart recovery program has been halted.
“I’ve seen the carts used for trailers, hauling stuff around, baby strollers – I once saw a cart with four children in it,” he said. “Other times, people who don’t have cars carry the cart back home rather than carrying the groceries by hand.”
Chambless said that while abandoned carts remain a problem in Hollister, the for-hire cart pickup services have helped to some degree.
Hollister resident David Murray, who has lived here for eight years, said he believes the problem is getting worse.
“At first, it was an occasional [problem] and I didn’t care,” he said. “But more and more no matter where I drive I see these carts and it is becoming an irritant. In half an hour I identified over 40 abandoned carts. Hollister is not a poverty-ridden Third World city. We need to take pride in our community.”
The managers of some local stores that use shopping carts said they could not comment on the issue and referred calls to their corporate offices. The manager of the local Kmart store, who asked not to be named, said that while he and others affiliated with the store “go around town and pick [the abandoned carts] up, it’s just not an issue here.”
Costillas, the Safeway manager, said the store is considering installing electronic monitoring devices on its 100 to 150 shopping carts that would lock the wheels on carts if they went beyond the perimeter of the store’s property.
That plan, currently in the bidding process, would likely not become a reality before July, as the store is first finishing a remodeling of its parking lot.
