Shopping Carts

The caller was outraged. "It is criminally irresponsible and a pernicious waste of money to give shopping carts to the homeless," he said, "and I intend to hold you personally responsible if one of your carts is used in a theft from my business." It's OK for Catholic Worker, a lay Catholic organization that provides services to the poor, to run a free soup kitchen.

Jeff Dietrich's point that giving shopping carts to street people keeps them visible to a community that would rather ignore them is absurd (Commentary, Aug. 4). Why not use the money spent on shopping carts to build a place in my neighborhood to house our brothers and sisters on the street--53rd Street and Hooper Avenue? Catholic Worker's answer to homelessness is as helpful as the new cathedral is to the church in L.A. What is the Catholic Church about these days? We have virtual armies of homeless people who roam the streets lifting whatever is not cemented down--chains don't work anymore!

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.

Behold the shopping cart, the humble receptacle of convenience for your average supermarket customer. But for a homeless person like Margaret Laverne Mitchell, the woman killed by an LAPD officer during a confrontation as she pushed her cart, the wiry, modern-day beast of burden is really a system of life support.

Mayor Willie Brown postponed his plan to have police seize shopping carts from street people Tuesday, saying that advocates for the homeless have overreacted and misrepresented his idea. "There's no sweep. There's no confiscation of goods and services of people," Brown said. "It's not anything near the hysteria that I have read and heard surrounding this."

Abandoned shopping carts are no longer just unsightly; they are now illegal. City Council members overrode the objections of grocers and gave preliminary approval to an ordinance that would allow the city to seize free-floating carts from public and private property and to fine business owners who want them back. "Our shopping cart problem is second only to our graffiti problem," Mayor Joanne Coontz said. Police Chief John R.

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.