Wireless Brakes Stop Shopping Cart Theft
A grocery chain in near Penn State's campus called Fresh Grocer has installed wirelessly-controlled ELECTRONIC BRAKES from California-based Carttronics on shopping carts to reduce its normal loss of $3,000 per month in losses from stolen carts -- normally from college students who steal the carts out of laziness. When the cart passes over a burred antenna under the sidewalks surrounding the store's parking lot, the right-front wheel locks up.
1:20 PM * PERMALINK * 13 comments
Comments:
LOL .. the students will probably lift the cart over the burried wire.. hopefully those radio signals have a good range..
*GASP* A grocery cart with only three functioning wheels? Yeah, that will stop those carts from rolling away...
Hardly news - they had this crap at the Safeway down the street 3 years ago - thay've since stopped using those shopping carts as the cost of replacing them when the tech failed was more than the cost of losing a few.
Yeah, I'm surprised Mike would report this as news, since he seems to be based somewhere in the Bay Area. Every Safeway I have been to in the Bay Area in the past several years has had these carts. Not news at all.
These carts are in use here in DC too.
BTW, the article is from the newspaper from the University of Pennsylvania, not Penn State.
They have these all over the US. I'm in Florida and they have them here.
Ha! Not in Canada yet! I can still get my groceries home without paying for cabs out of my poor, poor student fund...
To be fair, I use the same one and bring it back every week :)
they have them here in montreal, well had. A grocery store called Maxi & Cie had them installed when they first opened about 7 or 6 years ago. They got rid of them after 2 years.
this is not new tech, target in DC has been doing this for a few years now =/
They could try arresting cart thiefs.
We have them here, too. I understand the need (replacing them certainly gets expensive), but man, oh man, I wished they didn't have them one particular cold, rainy night when I was already sporting a cold and had parked at the far end of the lot (and on the wrong side of the magic line).
I had gone to the CVS in the same shopping center (and had parked in front of the CVS) and then walked over to the grocery store in the same center, completely forgetting about the "magic line." After loading up my cart, I hit that magic wall, and the thing just froze up. The device is effective...I couldn't budge it (and I certainly couldn't drag it all the way to my car).
So I asked some people sitting in front of a coffee shop to keep an eye on my cart while I went to retrieve my car.
I was already a bit cranky from the weather and my head cold, so needless to say that blasted little shopping cart did wonders for my outlook on things.
NOT PENN STATE!!! This from the University of Pennsylvania. It's an ivy league school. Please get your facts straight!
They have them in Ottawa at the Loblaws on Woodroffe and Baseline.
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