Shopping Carts

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.

City leaders have approved Anaheim's first ordinance aimed at removing abandoned shopping carts from streets. The City Council recently gave the nod for the ordinance, which offers incentives for shopping cart owners to remove carts from streets immediately after they are abandoned. The law also imposes fines if shopping cart owners fail more than three times within six months to pick up abandoned carts.

Abandoned shopping carts are a blight on streets from Beverly Hills to Woodland Hills. They represent theft that we pay for at the checkout stand. This Target shopping cart I photographed sat on the Canoga Avenue on-ramp to the 101 freeway for approximately three weeks before anyone removed it. I have asked the management of every store in my neighborhood what they would do if I walked out of their store with merchandise that I had not paid for.

Robert Hosey grinned with pride Monday as he showed off the spanking new shopping cart he received in exchange for a battered old one. "This one's a Cadillac," the 60-year-old homeless man said as he filled the new cart with his bedroll and crushed aluminum beer cans. "I love it." Hosey received one of the first of 100 carts bought by homeless activists and distributed on downtown's skid row in response to police confiscation of store-owned 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.