Shopping Carts

"Do you need any help out with your groceries today?" Well yes, as a matter of fact. There are three full grocery bags in the cart. And a purse. And a 3-year-old. And that cart is a lifesaver because a person only has two arms. But instead of going all the way to the car or the bus stop, the wheels are locked and the thing won't move. Staring down from a post and mocking shoppers is a snarky sign explaining that the carts will go only so far and then stop at an electronic barrier, and that this confounded new system is somehow there for our protection.

Re "L.A.'s war on shopping carts," Editorial, May 20 I walk to the store to do grocery shopping for the week. Because I cannot possibly get all these groceries on the bus or carry them home, what will the city do for me? Offer free taxi vouchers? If the mayor thinks requiring locking mechanisms on shopping cart wheels will boost his popularity, he should think again and get busy revoking this ordinance. Lori Graham Los Angeles I like shopping at Aldi grocery stores, a German-based chain with many locations in the U.S. You don't have to worry about hitting a shopping cart in the parking lot. How do they do it?

Where am I? Well, if there are streets lined with supermarket shopping carts--and the steady "whop-whop" of police helicopters (days and mostly nights)--you must be in Van Nuys. PHIL F. MARSIK Van Nuys

"Do you need any help out with your groceries today?" Well yes, as a matter of fact. There are three full grocery bags in the cart. And a purse. And a 3-year-old. And that cart is a lifesaver because a person only has two arms. But instead of going all the way to the car or the bus stop, the wheels are locked and the thing won't move. Staring down from a post and mocking shoppers is a snarky sign explaining that the carts will go only so far and then stop at an electronic barrier, and that this confounded new system is somehow there for our protection.

In The Times on July 11, the Anaheim City Council announced that it will try to repeal the shopping cart law. It wants to hold the owners of the carts responsible for picking them up. The owners are not the ones causing the blight on Anaheim streets. Why not hold the people responsible who use them for strollers, laundry carts and shopping carts to take home or leave in the streets as they see fit? I have been a resident of Anaheim for more than 30 years, and I see this go on every day. To put the burden on the store owner only is unfair.

Microsoft Corp. is bringing digital advertising to the grocery cart. The software maker has spent four years working with Plano, Texas-based MediaCart Holdings Inc. on a grocery cart-mounted console that helps shoppers find products in the store, then scan and pay for their items without waiting in a checkout line. Starting in the second half of this year, the companies plan to test MediaCart in Wakefern Food Corp.'s ShopRite supermarkets on the East Coast. Customers with a ShopRite loyalty card will be able to log into a website at home and type in their grocery lists; when they get to the store and swipe their card on the MediaCart console, the list will appear.

Keeping the city free of shopping carts has proved too costly for Costa Mesa, at least with the company it originally hired to do the job. The City Council recently canceled its agreement with Unlimited Contracting Service, hired last year to collect carts and return them to the markets from which they strayed. The council said it will save money by going with another company: Shopping Cart Retrieval Corp. City Manager Allan L.

The mere mention of abandoned shopping carts can ruin a resident's day and send even the most mild-mannered city official into a blistering tirade. The issue has long been a point of contention in cities across Orange County as residents demand that officials act more quickly to corral the carts, which they say signal urban blight in the form of "metal graffiti." Now a new state law that restricts how cities can rid streets of stray carts has officials up in arms.

Just months after city officials came up with a plan to corral renegade shopping carts, the state Legislature passed a law overriding city ordinances on the issue. But officials here said they would not give up on a problem the mayor has labeled as "second only to graffiti" in terms of blight in the city. City Council members on Tuesday agreed to draft a new ordinance incorporating changes in the law that could be approved at their Oct. 22 meeting.

Vandals have been dropping shopping carts from an overpass onto vehicles 17 feet below. No one was seriously hurt in the three attacks. No arrests have been made, but some teenage boys and young men are under investigation, officials said Wednesday.

Carol Schatz, a leading advocate for downtown business owners, says in her April 9 Times Op-Ed article that a federal judge's ruling to uphold the property rights of skid row's homeless residents enables homelessness. I am a homeless enabler. My organization, Los Angeles Catholic Worker, has been publicly accused by police and the business community of being homeless enablers because we provide food -- more than 5,000 meals weekly. We provide blankets, raincoats and heavy blue tarps for shelter.

A federal judge last year issued a preliminary injunction against the city of Los Angeles, effectively allowing anyone in the area around skid row to store personal belongings - including mattresses, overflowing plastic bags and shopping carts - on the sidewalks. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez was intended to protect the possessions of homeless and street people, and to prevent them from being mistaken for garbage and removed from the public sidewalks. As a predictable - if unintended - consequence of that ruling, hundreds of people have transformed the streets of skid row and surrounding neighborhoods into their personal storage facilities.

Greeters decked out in blue vests are a familiar sight at Wal-Mart  store entrances nationwide. Now they are moving inside. In February, the nation's biggest retailer will pull greeters from the lobby and into the store so they can more actively help with customer service, Wal-Mart  spokeswoman Ashley Hardie said. Greeters have been around at the discount giant since 1980. Hardie said Wal-Mart  has expanded the duties of greeters over the years to include tagging return items and wiping down shopping carts.

Southern California shoppers were offered a new twist Thursday to their annual Thanksgiving routine: the chance to do some post-dinner bargain hunting. Eager to get a jump on pushing low-priced inventory out the door, many big chains moved the opening bell for Black Friday sales to midnight -- or even earlier. Toys R Us opened at 9 p.m., while Wal-Mart trotted out new bargains at 10. Macy's, Kohl's, Target and other chains were set to open at midnight. But not all went smoothly.

So far there have been no dead bodies, no safes stuffed with soggy cash, no rusty stolen cars. The only things exposed by the receding water at Echo Park Lake have been shopping carts, 55-gallon steel barrels, a parking-enforcement "boot" and lots of skateboards. But who knows what is still hidden in the muck at the bottom of the 13-acre lake, soon to be dredged and outfitted with a leak-proof clay liner? Officials say that leaks once required them to replenish the lake with valuable drinking water.

The long-awaited Paddle the Los Angeles River pilot program got off to a wobbly start Monday as two dozen civic leaders in hard hats and bulging life vests stepped into kayaks and pushed out through murky ripples in the Sepulveda Basin. The group of flood control officials and City Councilmen Tony Cardenas and Ed Reyes was chaperoned by experienced kayakers and naturalists on hand to make sure no one tipped over into the treated urban runoff or entangled themselves in the heavy brush laden with shredded clothing and plastic bags that lines the 70-foot-wide channel.

San Francisco is spending $650,000 a year to deal with shopping carts left in public places, mostly by the homeless. The city collects, cleans and stores the carts. It also keeps most of the confiscated possessions for months to protect itself from lawsuits, as many homeless people have challenged the city in recent years about missing belongings. Belongings are kept for at least 90 days, but only 1% of them are ever claimed.

To rid streets of shopping carts, the City Council today will consider an ordinance to deal with lost, stolen or abandoned carts. The proposed ordinance includes the immediate impounding of shopping carts that impede emergency services or do not have identification. Those with identification, but where the cart owner has agreed to waive the three-day notice to retrieve the property, will also be picked up immediately.

It looked like an anti-terrorist takedown: five cop cars, 10 police officers, a yellow skip loader and a 5-ton dump truck. They screeched to a halt and blocked off 6th Street in front of our soup kitchen in downtown Los Angeles. But their target this spring was not a suicide bomber or a hidden nuclear device; it was the four red shopping carts parked in front of our building. Those of us who had worked on skid row for a while were not surprised; we'd seen it all before. It has been standard city policy since the mid-1980s to have the aforementioned convoy of skip loader, dump truck and police escort patrol the streets of skid row to confiscate the unattended possessions of homeless people — belongings deemed superfluous, excessive or simply trash.

Tina Cassar spent last week watching rain flood her backyard and overflow from her pool. So when the sun came out Sunday morning, the Los Alamitos resident took her family for brunch and a stroll along Seal Beach. There they encountered a stretch of sand littered with mangled shopping carts, bicycle tires, tennis shoes and thousands of plastic cups and bottles. "It's awful," Cassar, 37, said as she walked along the shore. "It just shows what kind of pollution comes through the river system."