Aldi is on to something, but even their method is over complicated. Just store the mother fucking carts IN the parking lot corrals. Need a cart? Bring it in yourself, bitch. Make the laziest fuck on shift go out once an hour or two to collect the loose carts and take them back to a corral. Much easier than dedicating some chump to pushing cart trains back to the store all day.  Then you have some extra square footage to pimp more cheap chinese garbage.

Tell me why my idea is stupid, I know I’m overlooking some obvious reason as to why no one has thought of this yet.

Theft

And snow

Snowed here today.  I don't want a snow covered cart plus having to push it in from the parking lot.

Employee safety risk. You will inevitably get the shopper that comes in and starts with the "Muhfugga whachu mean you ain't keep no carts in this bitch!?" then the employees try to calm them down, which is interpreted as disrespect, and before you know it you're dealing with a mass code black, following the glock switch being let loose.

The Aldis near me all have the carts under the building overhang.   Less likely to be wet, and drip water on the floor when brought inside.  Lessens likelihood of "slip and falls".

No, my local grocery store does it right. Carts are not allowed in the parking lot. You can either carry your stuff out, or pull up to an area where they will load your vehicle.

Your idea doesn't fix the problem.

The problem is lazy as fuck people leaving carts everywhere. Having a guy go out and get them still aids the lazy as the only time they'd need to find a cart was when the cart area was empty. This wouldn't deter them from being trash and leaving it on a curb near their car once theyre done with it.

Best method was growing up in Germany, where there was Aldi amongst others, and you had to go to the cart area, insert a 5 Mark coin into a box connected to another cart via a chain and it would release.

You either brought the cart back to the cart area and rechained it, thus letting your 5 marks come back out or you lost the money.

Make fat ass Americans pay $5 to 'rent' the cart and if they don't bring it back to the cart area, its lost. Would pay for quite a bit of staff.

i don’t mean to 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣but also can see this play out in any state these days.

This is the answer. Heinens for me. What kind of poor shuttles around their own groceries?

Riesbeck's

Nice sturdy paper bags with handles.

They roll your groceries out and put them in your trunk.

Short sighted post... What kind of poor does their own grocery shopping?  

I live in Alabama., so that never crossed my mind. Folks here clear the shelves at the threat of the white stuff, so if there is actual snow there’s no reason to go shopping anyways.

Well, I go to the store, I point at the items that I want and the little worker puts them in the cart thingy. Every now and then I'll make him put an item in the cart, just to tell him 1 aisle over that I don't actually want that item. It's fun to watch him run an aisle over to put it back while I yell, "I don't have all day!"
Then I wave my phone over the card reader when they tell me how much.
They send an errand boy to place the groceries in my trunk. I always crack the window about an inch and tell him he could have done it better, but still give him a $10 bill each time. I'm sure he appreciates it.
Then I get the pleasure of driving home and seeing my butler call upon the kitchen staff to unload the days haul.
So, to answer your question I do it to exercise power and control over insignificant poors, and it makes me feel good.

I bought three of those 25 cent Aldi carts they are handy around the house.

Delivery
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In the U.K. they have the ‘rent’ carts at Tesco. I have a keychain slug that fits in the lock to get a cart. Done shopping, plug into the next cart to get your slug back. Dry carts under the eves are better than the wet carts in the parking lot.

A quarter ain't what it used to be.

I often see carts out in the parking lot. Sometimes I make a dollar rounding them up and taking them back up to the entrance. Don't mind the exercise.

Any customer who questions my motives can go fuck themselves.

I seem to remember seeing these Rent-A-Carts in airports around 1979? I always thought it was a good idea.
Americans are lazy, LOL. So we get the parking area full of carts because they literally won't walk fifteen feet to a corral. Maybe for five bucks they will but how many carry cash?

Having carts close to the store deters theft, which has become more rampant these last couple years from all the "Guest Workers". I don't live in "The Big City", I live in one of the suburbs kind of off in left field so our troubles wit'the F'n illegals has.....oh, sorry...."N-e-w-c-o-m-e-r-s" LOL somewhat less. But it's obvious we have a large homeless population or, people without cars who have a lot of shit to tote around who steal carts.

The two major stores close to me I shop at both have lost 50 to 70 percent of their carts. I've shopped these stores for years. One store replaced theirs TWICE in the last year. The first time they got new carts with FOUR no-go wheels on'em. You know, they sense when they run over the wire at the edge of the parking lot and lock the wheels up. Or, if you try to go around the checkouts in the store, the wheels lock up IN the store, LOL. They got all four wheels because one or two wasn't enough to prevent someone from running it up on two wheels and riding right over the sensor at the far edge of the parking lot or just shoving it along on the three or two wheels that turn. Plus, these new carts were mostly plastic. Light enough for a skinny homeless person (apparently) lift up and over or two to just carry off. So they got all metal ones again with those silly wheels.

One store has indoor storage for their carts and corrals in the lot. I was there today. I'd estimate they have lost about half since they got the new ones in January. The other one has two huge areas outside under cover. At full capacity I'd be they had 200-ish carts. The other day I grabbed a cart from a corral on my way in. There were almost none in the areas outside the store and there weren't more than fifty shoppers, if that. On my way out I went around the lot; eight corrals, no more than five in any corral. Yeah. They missing some.

You drive?
How...quaint.

We so needed this thread today.

At the end of the day, someone would have to collect the carts and secure them.

Under the current operating procedures, the cars are secured when the three people working the store close up.

I do that and end up with a bunch of quarters in my console.  This allows me to be a hero to women with Big Blue Eyes who don't have a quarter.

Because Bubbles would throw them down a ravine, retrieve them later for sale to a competing store, thus increasing overhead.

I really don't understand this mess. My town has one grocery store. They keep the carts outside under the awning in a rack.

Everybody grabs one as they come in, they fill their carts and pay. The employees put the groceries in the cart. The customers take the carts out to their vehicles and put the groceries in the car ( except elderly folks and really pregnant women , those someone will volunteer to take out for them). Once they're done with the carts, the customers bring them back and put them back where they got them from so the next person can get one.

There are no carts in the lot, none in the store, they're all put back where they're supposed to be. Nobody has ever stolen a cart.

It's been this way for 75 years.

Why is it that other cities can't do it? It's not hard.

Aldi near me makes you pay if you want a cart.

"Pay it forward" and just leave the cart in the lot with the quarter.

Cheap Karma for a quarter a pop.

I know, we're high rollers. lol

This is good. I think the Aldi idea of a quarter to unlock one is better.  Make you return it yourself.

Unless it’s raining, I always grab a cart from the corral and return it to the corral when I’m done. OP’s on to something.

Nothing is stopping the thieves now. Why would leaving them out be any different?

I was just at the store yesterday and there were no carts inside the store or even near the door. Guess what, Myself and every shopper I saw in the 1 minute before I started shopping went BACK OUTSIDE and found a fucking cart.

Snow is pretty much another day that ends in Y type of thing here so it generally doesn't disrupt our day.

Pushing shopping carts in the snow is a pain in the balls.

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Carts get extremely hot to the touch here in Phoenix
Sun, keeping them inside is nice.

Whats stopping them from taking them outside? Mine doesnt allow the powered or short carts outside but yet they end up outside. Hell the local Walmarts has problems with punks taking the electric carts and racing them around the store running into things and people.