SAN DIEGO — They carry bags of groceries, sure, but shopping carts are far more versatile. They serve as a portable suitcase for transients, a go-cart for children, a laundry hamper for apartment dwellers and a barbecue pit for beachgoers.
The humble carts are so popular that grocers spend millions of dollars annually trying to keep wayward carts on their property.
CartTronics, a San Diego-based company, has developed a cheap alternative--a device that locks the cart's front wheel when it rolls outside the parking lot. It's the grocery store's equivalent of a car alarm and the device is catching on with chains nationwide.
"It's virtually foolproof," said David Perisher, manager at Molly Stone's Market in the upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood in San Francisco. "You try to get a cart off of my lot, you can't do it. Because that front wheel locks down, all you can do is drag it, it creates so much resistance."
Perisher installed the Cart Anti-theft Protection System, or CAPS, last fall on his 60 carts, which have all stayed put. Saad Hirmez, owner of the Apple Tree Market in the San Diego community of Ocean Beach, has had the same success with his 35 carts since last May.
"Zero carts lost. Impressive, huh?" Hirmez said.
The Supermarket Institute in Washington estimates that a shopping cart is stolen every 90 seconds in the United States. About 1.8 million shopping carts were taken from retail stores last year at a replacement cost of about $175 million, according to the Washington-based Food Marketing Institute. An additional $117 million was spent by grocers to hire contractors to retrieve abandoned carts.
Those were staggering, but encouraging statistics to Jeff French, chairman and founder of CartTronics. After a friend told him about the problems his business had with constant cart thefts, French decided to invest in a solution. He and several others spent the next few years testing and perfecting CAPS.
What they came up with was a system controlled by a low-frequency radio signal. An antenna is installed in the ground around the supermarket's perimeter, delineated by a painted stripe. The antenna, not affected by climate or temperature, emits a low-frequency radio signal that, when the cart passes over the stripe, triggers a plastic cover to drop over the wheel. The wheel then becomes useless, but there is no damage to it should a customer try to force movement. Store employees unlock the device with a hand-held remote.
