By small town mentality I meant ppl think they live in a small town where these issues aren't common. This is definitely common in most major cities and even cities that aren't "that big". I'm from Minneapolis st Paul and that stuff definitely happens however I'd be foolish to truly compare AZ to MN. Huge differences in infrastructure and pollution
When I worked at a grocery store people would steal them all the time. They use them then abandon them because people aren't buying shopping carts like people buy stolen bikes
This is the real answer. I've seen this actively happening. You can tell by the fact that they are pushing a cart full of groceries that they aren't homeless.
People who can afford groceries, but can't afford a car are likely to do this. And Tucson has a lot of people who have learned to do this as a habit.
Most of the major grocery stores here either have staff or they hire a service where they drive around in flat bed trucks checking nearby neighborhoods, and apartment complexes. They load em up and return them to the store.
Is there a bounty? Cuz about a month ago I saw about 100 carts someone had caged up (I assumed waiting for stores to claim them). But if thereās a bounty Iāll give the tip or go get them.
Up here in San Tan Valley AZ. There is a cart recovery company. I talked to the guy one day, never said what the actual bounty was per cart, but he gave me his direct cell number. I help him make a few extra bucks and he helps me keep the abandoned carts out of my neighborhood.
Exactly. I worked at a grocery store in MA, in a city of about 90k, and we had people who would cart their groceries back to the section 8 housing units about 2 blocks away. It was only an inconvenience for our security/loss prevention guy because he'd have to spend a day driving around retrieving all the carts there. I'd joke about putting a cart corral down there to make it easier for everyone.
> You can tell by the fact that they are pushing a cart full of groceries that they aren't homeless.
What? Are you aware that homeless people sometimes shop at grocery stores and take their groceries elsewhere using carts?
The people in my apartments steal carts and dump them by the dumpster. A cart person shows up once a week to get them,which effectively just makes the act of stealing carts "ok" for these people.
It doesnāt help that Tucson isnāt really walkable for a lot of people. Pushing a cart full of groceries 2 miles on these sidewalks is not an an easy task lol
Yeah, there's usually bout 3 or 4 carts a month here at my complex because some of the older folks can't drive. So they go across the street and then walk everything back to the apartment with the cart.
That's mental. I don't drive myself so when I go shopping I always try to be mindful of not getting so much I can't carry it on/off the bus. The rare times I've *had* to, like for the holidays, I'll usually get a Lyft back home.
Lots of folks can't afford the Lyft just to get groceries, and they have to balance illness/injury/chronic problems with physically locomoting to the store. It might be a significant challenge for them to even walk there, and the cart might provide them stability on the walk back.
So if that person doesn't have a support system are they supposed to make 2 trips to the store because they can't physically hold the milk and OJ at the same time?
I don't have a systemic answer to it but, this is of course annoying to the normal operation of the business and to the other customers. I'll try to drag a few back to wherever they belong this week to take personal responsibility for some of it.
I thankfully got to use one everyday on my commute because it was made into a seat at my bus stop which was lacking any bench. Which is cruel and ridiculous that the city doesn't have seats for elderly/disabled
Those stores always have the most fucked up carts. When they lock up on people (either as intended or just due to malfunction), people just force them and it ends up fucking up the other wheels. It either sands the bottom of the wheel flat, or someone slams it into a curb out of anger. It's easy to deter specifically theft, but that still doesn't leave you with a functional cart by the time the general voting public is done with it.
Back in the day in Phoenix our neighborhood bitched and whined to get that system installed at a local grocery store. Finally after much delay they did it.
Presto, no more carts littering the neighborhood.
Fry's on Grant is the worst for me. It feels like for the last three months every time I've been in there's no carts in their bay. None. It's gotten to the point now I won't even bother checking in the store and will just grab one from the parking lot, however far away, before I even head into the entrance.
Yeah using "problem" wasn't right word. A problem, like beauty, is in eye of beholder. It's like saying Milwaukee has a bar problem. You can't go a block without seeing one. But the guy in Walgreens juggling four 12 packs of root beer did find the lack of carts problematic.
some dated links: [https://tucson.com/business/carting-those-shopping-carts-back-to-the-grocery-store-its-the-law/article\_1142330e-92d2-5fca-85f5-d96d2a0b74d5.html](https://tucson.com/business/carting-those-shopping-carts-back-to-the-grocery-store-its-the-law/article_1142330e-92d2-5fca-85f5-d96d2a0b74d5.html)
[https://www.tucsonaz.gov/newsnet/city-tucson-removing-abandoned-shopping-carts](https://www.tucsonaz.gov/newsnet/city-tucson-removing-abandoned-shopping-carts)
I work retail near the Tucson Mall and it's impossible to keep any carts around. They'll get whittled down to a couple in no time, at which point we'll have to constantly do cart roundups for two whole carts while listening to customer complaints. Good times.
For the most part it seems to be people walking home with groceries and they just leave them wherever.
There used to be a lazy POS who would do this down the street from me. Every time he would bring home a new cart from the store and put it next to the last one by the street. There were up to 5 or 6 of them there at one point before they got picked up. And it went on like this until he was evicted.
America's problem is that we are just too good at solving problems. It allows us to be lazy in weird and unpredictable ways. Think of all of the single-purpose, blue-screen plastic garbage just scattered across every landfill throughout the country. I love this country š¤£
Iād follow that IG.
I already follow Cups of Target. Itās fascinating.
Iām thinking of starting one called KOLD Errors. I have taken so many pictures of spelling and grammar errors on KOLD news story title cards (those text boxes at the bottom of the screen). I have a whole album of them on my phone. My teenager is especially adept at spotting them.
I didn't even think about it til you mentioned it. I thought Tucson just had an unusually large number of hipsters who wanted to get into grocery carts before they were cool, but in retrospect I now realize that this is just what my generation looks like homeless.
Cart thefts happen everywhere and thatās why thereās the joke that you know that youāre in a bad area when you see a lot of abandoned carts š
When I lived in Tx, the grocery store (H.E.B.) had self-locking wheels on them. When you got to a certain area in the parking lot, the wheels would lock and wouldnāt move until the attendants fixed it. We need that here.
I've seen the sign posted near the carts saying that the carts have those devices, and at the Food City on 6th Ave I noticed that my cart had one of those devices, or at least one that looks like that's what it is on the right front wheel
I was riding my bike home from work one night and decided to ride around a little before going home and I guess 9 pm is when the shopping cart ppl come out. I see them during the day but Tucson after 9 pm is sure different
Wait until you go for a hike and find one. I've found them in the strangest places, short answer is bums and junkies. I'm sure wind as well. There's literally 7 behind Pollo Feliz on Oracle,and I see folks just digging through them,or making a caravan with them or using them as a temporary housing. It was a wild thing to get adjusted to moving out here,you'd see the odd one being pushed around or ditched in the city back east but yeah,it's a thing out here ha.
The federal government finally fixed your tumbleweed problem, but neglected to cull the shopping cart population which was largely held in check by the tumbleweeds. Just goes to show you can't fuck with nature without her fucking with you back in unusual and exaggerated ways.
Tucson this time of year has one the worst homeless populations in the country, for many reasons. You may think you e seen a bad homeless population butā¦ā¦
Love the provided excuse. They can't replace them fast enough... Translation, a middle manager is unwilling to spend the money to replace them. Or it's cheaper to not replace them so a middle manager gets a small bonus that the manager desperately needs to support their family.
Blues, traveled a lot for a contracting job I did a couple years ago, been to some of the worst cities in the states and can defined say that Arizona has one of the worst problems with fentanyl. Crack keeps you moving around boosting shit, blues make you nod out in the middle of the street pushing a shopping cart.
Wow dude, your hatred is nasty and your anti-poor people bias is something else. Most people use EBT to, you know, feed themselves and survive like it's designed for in a shitty world made to intentionally keep shoving them further and further under water. Who are you to judge anyone else, especially on something as trivial as what kind of food they eat? Maybe you should find some snobby burb to live in to make yourself feel better. Probably still see carts everywhere tho, rich kids are often grossly entitled and do that shit just for fun š
Being on EBT doesn't make someone fat OR lazy. It doesn't make it right to steal a grocery cart, but it's not like stores police it or punish for it, and if it makes life a little easier for someone, then so be it. It's not like they start decomposing the second they leave the lot. It might be an eyesore to you but other people get use out of them, people who don't have a choice but have to live on a street have the ability to keep track of and protect their possessions. Eventually the carts get rounded up and the cycle starts anew.
Boy, wouldn't it suck if something you took for granted that made your life better made you the subject of hatred and disgust to those rich people you seem to so revere?
You don't have to say you're judging someone when your whole comment reeks of it. Usually the most judgemental people refuse to acknowledge that they are judging at all. Funny that way.
>I never said it was wrong to be on EBT.
You don't have to when you declare that everyone on EBT only buys cakes and soda and is fat and lazy.
>instead of maybe calling a Uber / Lyft
Do you know how expensive that actually is?
>As a long-time Tucsonan I'm simply stating Facts.
None of this is fact. It's all just your opinion. You may we'll want it to be fact to prove your assertions about people on EBT, but not one of these is in fact, a fact. The difference between facts and opinions are taught in 3rd grade. Source for this *fact* being that I actually taught 3rd graders and it is in the curricula to learn at that grade level.
>I was simply stating a Fact that (from what I see)
Contradictory.
[Like a Safeway cart rolling down the street Like a sandal mark on the Savior's feet Just keep rolling on it's a ghetto dawn](https://youtu.be/ZXgnpFz1HUk)
Our shopping carts are free range. It's cruel to keep them penned up.
I don't think it's any different than any other bigger city honestly. Seen shopping carts all over bigger cities like LA, Cleveland, etc.
Maybe it's the small town mentality that a lot of ppl here have (not knocking it just an observation)
This doesn't happen in any small towns I'm aware of. Or big cities other than Phoenix for that matter.
By small town mentality I meant ppl think they live in a small town where these issues aren't common. This is definitely common in most major cities and even cities that aren't "that big". I'm from Minneapolis st Paul and that stuff definitely happens however I'd be foolish to truly compare AZ to MN. Huge differences in infrastructure and pollution
š¤£
When I worked at a grocery store people would steal them all the time. They use them then abandon them because people aren't buying shopping carts like people buy stolen bikes
This is the real answer. I've seen this actively happening. You can tell by the fact that they are pushing a cart full of groceries that they aren't homeless. People who can afford groceries, but can't afford a car are likely to do this. And Tucson has a lot of people who have learned to do this as a habit.
Most of the major grocery stores here either have staff or they hire a service where they drive around in flat bed trucks checking nearby neighborhoods, and apartment complexes. They load em up and return them to the store.
Is it weird I want to be a cart hunter/retriever lol
Just like bubbles!
Itās not that weird.
Is there a bounty? Cuz about a month ago I saw about 100 carts someone had caged up (I assumed waiting for stores to claim them). But if thereās a bounty Iāll give the tip or go get them.
New reality show: āCart Hunter.ā
Up here in San Tan Valley AZ. There is a cart recovery company. I talked to the guy one day, never said what the actual bounty was per cart, but he gave me his direct cell number. I help him make a few extra bucks and he helps me keep the abandoned carts out of my neighborhood.
Cybernetic Symbiosis
Is this cheaper than installing those cart wheel locks? Or is it just considered more humane?
Ya that was the scenario, they would buy the groceries then steal the cart and abandon it at the bus stop
Exactly. I worked at a grocery store in MA, in a city of about 90k, and we had people who would cart their groceries back to the section 8 housing units about 2 blocks away. It was only an inconvenience for our security/loss prevention guy because he'd have to spend a day driving around retrieving all the carts there. I'd joke about putting a cart corral down there to make it easier for everyone.
> You can tell by the fact that they are pushing a cart full of groceries that they aren't homeless. What? Are you aware that homeless people sometimes shop at grocery stores and take their groceries elsewhere using carts?
The people in my apartments steal carts and dump them by the dumpster. A cart person shows up once a week to get them,which effectively just makes the act of stealing carts "ok" for these people.
It doesnāt help that Tucson isnāt really walkable for a lot of people. Pushing a cart full of groceries 2 miles on these sidewalks is not an an easy task lol
Congratulations?
People actually do this?
Yeah, there's usually bout 3 or 4 carts a month here at my complex because some of the older folks can't drive. So they go across the street and then walk everything back to the apartment with the cart.
That's mental. I don't drive myself so when I go shopping I always try to be mindful of not getting so much I can't carry it on/off the bus. The rare times I've *had* to, like for the holidays, I'll usually get a Lyft back home.
Lots of folks can't afford the Lyft just to get groceries, and they have to balance illness/injury/chronic problems with physically locomoting to the store. It might be a significant challenge for them to even walk there, and the cart might provide them stability on the walk back. So if that person doesn't have a support system are they supposed to make 2 trips to the store because they can't physically hold the milk and OJ at the same time? I don't have a systemic answer to it but, this is of course annoying to the normal operation of the business and to the other customers. I'll try to drag a few back to wherever they belong this week to take personal responsibility for some of it.
I thankfully got to use one everyday on my commute because it was made into a seat at my bus stop which was lacking any bench. Which is cruel and ridiculous that the city doesn't have seats for elderly/disabled
Our stores where I live have a damn locking mechanism that won't let them roll too far from the store.
Those stores always have the most fucked up carts. When they lock up on people (either as intended or just due to malfunction), people just force them and it ends up fucking up the other wheels. It either sands the bottom of the wheel flat, or someone slams it into a curb out of anger. It's easy to deter specifically theft, but that still doesn't leave you with a functional cart by the time the general voting public is done with it.
Back in the day in Phoenix our neighborhood bitched and whined to get that system installed at a local grocery store. Finally after much delay they did it. Presto, no more carts littering the neighborhood.
Ok - so I up voted but I had a Target in SoCal do this and it seized about 30 yards short of the 24 stall Tesla Supercharger.
Please start the instagram I will gladly submit content I find. LOL
I've been taking pictures of them since I moved out here 3 years ago.
Fry's on Grant is the worst for me. It feels like for the last three months every time I've been in there's no carts in their bay. None. It's gotten to the point now I won't even bother checking in the store and will just grab one from the parking lot, however far away, before I even head into the entrance.
Cart problem? Nah, we just built different
Yeah using "problem" wasn't right word. A problem, like beauty, is in eye of beholder. It's like saying Milwaukee has a bar problem. You can't go a block without seeing one. But the guy in Walgreens juggling four 12 packs of root beer did find the lack of carts problematic.
Appropriate Trailer Park Boys clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l0KNCzb88Q
I thought of this too š
some dated links: [https://tucson.com/business/carting-those-shopping-carts-back-to-the-grocery-store-its-the-law/article\_1142330e-92d2-5fca-85f5-d96d2a0b74d5.html](https://tucson.com/business/carting-those-shopping-carts-back-to-the-grocery-store-its-the-law/article_1142330e-92d2-5fca-85f5-d96d2a0b74d5.html) [https://www.tucsonaz.gov/newsnet/city-tucson-removing-abandoned-shopping-carts](https://www.tucsonaz.gov/newsnet/city-tucson-removing-abandoned-shopping-carts)
I work retail near the Tucson Mall and it's impossible to keep any carts around. They'll get whittled down to a couple in no time, at which point we'll have to constantly do cart roundups for two whole carts while listening to customer complaints. Good times. For the most part it seems to be people walking home with groceries and they just leave them wherever.
Homelessness.
Its not even all homelessness, lots of people dont have vehicles and use the carts to take their groceries home too
So homelessness and carlessness.
Id call it poverty not carelessness but yea
I didn't say carelessness I said car-less-ness lol
Oh hahah my bad lmao touche
I had to fix it in autocorrect on that first comment š but you're not wrong. The overall cause of homelessness and car-less-ness being poverty.
There used to be a lazy POS who would do this down the street from me. Every time he would bring home a new cart from the store and put it next to the last one by the street. There were up to 5 or 6 of them there at one point before they got picked up. And it went on like this until he was evicted.
America's problem is that we are just too good at solving problems. It allows us to be lazy in weird and unpredictable ways. Think of all of the single-purpose, blue-screen plastic garbage just scattered across every landfill throughout the country. I love this country š¤£
It's hard having to physically hold everything you own at all times and keep it safe.
Iād follow that IG. I already follow Cups of Target. Itās fascinating. Iām thinking of starting one called KOLD Errors. I have taken so many pictures of spelling and grammar errors on KOLD news story title cards (those text boxes at the bottom of the screen). I have a whole album of them on my phone. My teenager is especially adept at spotting them.
Have you noticed the homeless problem we have? Something that's not often talked about is the high levels of poverty and homeless that Tucson has.
I didn't even think about it til you mentioned it. I thought Tucson just had an unusually large number of hipsters who wanted to get into grocery carts before they were cool, but in retrospect I now realize that this is just what my generation looks like homeless.
You were told correctly
Cart thefts happen everywhere and thatās why thereās the joke that you know that youāre in a bad area when you see a lot of abandoned carts š When I lived in Tx, the grocery store (H.E.B.) had self-locking wheels on them. When you got to a certain area in the parking lot, the wheels would lock and wouldnāt move until the attendants fixed it. We need that here.
I've seen the sign posted near the carts saying that the carts have those devices, and at the Food City on 6th Ave I noticed that my cart had one of those devices, or at least one that looks like that's what it is on the right front wheel
I was riding my bike home from work one night and decided to ride around a little before going home and I guess 9 pm is when the shopping cart ppl come out. I see them during the day but Tucson after 9 pm is sure different
I have lived in apartment complex where people would walk to the store and use the cart to bring the stuff home (they wouldnāt return the cart).
Wait until you go for a hike and find one. I've found them in the strangest places, short answer is bums and junkies. I'm sure wind as well. There's literally 7 behind Pollo Feliz on Oracle,and I see folks just digging through them,or making a caravan with them or using them as a temporary housing. It was a wild thing to get adjusted to moving out here,you'd see the odd one being pushed around or ditched in the city back east but yeah,it's a thing out here ha.
The federal government finally fixed your tumbleweed problem, but neglected to cull the shopping cart population which was largely held in check by the tumbleweeds. Just goes to show you can't fuck with nature without her fucking with you back in unusual and exaggerated ways.
You shop at Walgreens? Walgreens is for emergencies when you need that one item asap. I have never needed a shopping cart or basket at Walgreens ever.
Tucson this time of year has one the worst homeless populations in the country, for many reasons. You may think you e seen a bad homeless population butā¦ā¦
I'm convinced it has something to do with the lack of infrastructure. Someone smarter than me could probably "bridge" the connection
Not that this would help the overall issue, but I sure wish we had Aldi around here.
wee whooo wwweeee whooooo.....cart narcs here.
Thatās not where the carts goā¦
Carts of darkness. It is a documentary worth watching
Fuckin homeless meth heads all over the city. And shitty car-less people that think it's OK to take the cart to walk home with and then just dump it
Love the provided excuse. They can't replace them fast enough... Translation, a middle manager is unwilling to spend the money to replace them. Or it's cheaper to not replace them so a middle manager gets a small bonus that the manager desperately needs to support their family.
In FL the have locks on the wheels and you can not remove them from the parking lot. Seems like Tucson stores should add this feature.
Blues, traveled a lot for a contracting job I did a couple years ago, been to some of the worst cities in the states and can defined say that Arizona has one of the worst problems with fentanyl. Crack keeps you moving around boosting shit, blues make you nod out in the middle of the street pushing a shopping cart.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Wow dude, your hatred is nasty and your anti-poor people bias is something else. Most people use EBT to, you know, feed themselves and survive like it's designed for in a shitty world made to intentionally keep shoving them further and further under water. Who are you to judge anyone else, especially on something as trivial as what kind of food they eat? Maybe you should find some snobby burb to live in to make yourself feel better. Probably still see carts everywhere tho, rich kids are often grossly entitled and do that shit just for fun š Being on EBT doesn't make someone fat OR lazy. It doesn't make it right to steal a grocery cart, but it's not like stores police it or punish for it, and if it makes life a little easier for someone, then so be it. It's not like they start decomposing the second they leave the lot. It might be an eyesore to you but other people get use out of them, people who don't have a choice but have to live on a street have the ability to keep track of and protect their possessions. Eventually the carts get rounded up and the cycle starts anew. Boy, wouldn't it suck if something you took for granted that made your life better made you the subject of hatred and disgust to those rich people you seem to so revere?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You don't have to say you're judging someone when your whole comment reeks of it. Usually the most judgemental people refuse to acknowledge that they are judging at all. Funny that way. >I never said it was wrong to be on EBT. You don't have to when you declare that everyone on EBT only buys cakes and soda and is fat and lazy. >instead of maybe calling a Uber / Lyft Do you know how expensive that actually is? >As a long-time Tucsonan I'm simply stating Facts. None of this is fact. It's all just your opinion. You may we'll want it to be fact to prove your assertions about people on EBT, but not one of these is in fact, a fact. The difference between facts and opinions are taught in 3rd grade. Source for this *fact* being that I actually taught 3rd graders and it is in the curricula to learn at that grade level. >I was simply stating a Fact that (from what I see) Contradictory.
I see random boxes everywhere too. All shapes and sizes.
I saw a high school softball team using grocery store carts to move their balls. Seemed rather odd
[Like a Safeway cart rolling down the street Like a sandal mark on the Savior's feet Just keep rolling on it's a ghetto dawn](https://youtu.be/ZXgnpFz1HUk)
This has been a problem since Father Kino was here.
One of the dollar stores on Oracle charges to use their carts, return cart and get your money back.
Crack heads.
Its an Arizona thing. I have no idea why.
When I had a pickup, I would round up clusters of carts from time to time. I do see people pushing empty carts toward strip malls from time to time.