> depositing a quarter for a cart eliminates the need to pay people to collect carts
What's the alternative? Growing up in Germany I've literally never seen it any other way.
What's the alternative? Growing up in Germany I've literally never seen it any other way.
I really hate trying to turn into a spot that's flanked by two SUVs only to find a cart in the way. People are incredibly lazy. I love the ALDI's quarter scheme… it's just enough of a nudge to get people to do the decent thing.
What you were told sounds like one of those slightly tongue-in-cheek excuses people sometimes use to justify behavior, though that doesn't necessarily make it insincere. For most of high school I worked dishwashing jobs. A typical task for a dishwasher includes picking up trash in the parking lot. People throwing trash in the parking lot weren't doing me or anyone else any favors.
Do you do that consistently now that you're an adult? Do you bus your own tables at local restaurants (small business owner) but not at franchise restaurants?
But then, I also don't shop at Aldi or need a trolley.
I also don’t carry things in my pockets.
The fees associated with debit card transactions don’t land on me, so...
Here in the UK, shopping carts used to take a £1 coin, which incidentally had very similar geometry to the Indian 5 rupee coin (worth about 5 pence) - that was a great little find for our family, who always had a few 5 rupee coins lying around from our time visiting family in India. Sadly they updated the design of the £1 coin, so this trick no longer works.
Honestly, having to put a coin in to get a cart would mean I would likely never get a cart. I never pay with cash, and thus I never have coins with me, so I would be limited to whatever I could carry. This is obviously bad for business, so I think businesses just eat the cost of having an employee round up the carts.
Then again, I hate seeing carts everywhere, and sometimes find myself returning a few because they're such a nuisance. If this solves the problem, I might consider leaving a coin in my wallet to shop at Aldi instead of my cart-ridden local grocery store.
This thing was introduced in France, because the French customers had another attitude to it and that got extrapolated by the huge French hipermarché concept.
With that kind of throughput and the involved logistics of bigger pieces handed out on a trolley at the order counter, introducing the money deposit for the trolleys would massively slow down everything, possibly creating waiting lines at trolley stations as they sometimes happen during busy times at grocers.
At least the employes collecting the carts have electrical little pushing cars, enabling them to push impressively long "snakes" of trolleys.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Pf...
Put a coin in the drawer and close it, the chain of the next cart pops out the back and you can take it. On return, you push the chain back in, the drawer pops open and you get your coin back.
Store employees just occasionally balance cart numbers between the corrals, if there's multiple.
Put a coin(or any coin shaped object) in and a simple mechanic latch releases the chain, plug it back in and you get your coin back.
To get one, you insert a coin (or a plastic token - these are usually given away as freebies by many companies if not the stores themselves) and that unlocks the chain.
It's not about the money, no one earns anything from this. It's about putting something that you own (can be worthless, the emotion counts) in the cart which you can only possibly get back if you return the cart to any number of bays on the parking lot or next to the entrance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smarte_Carte looks like it might be the airport system you have in mind.
The usual European shopping cart system works with a coin deposit, chains and mechanical locks on each cart, as described in several other comments.
Often this results in them being left all over the place or stolen though.
I don't feel like that amount of labor is a tremendous cost for the supermarket.
And that's when the cart collectors were being quick and not just out there fooling around.
In addition, if things got busy inside and we forgot to collect carts for a while, we'd run out and customers would get upset that they didn't have a cart to use. This was especially likely during rain when no customers would return carts or bring carts on their way in.
Walmart as one example has a motorized cart mover. The employee collects and stacks the carts into a line, backed by the motorized unit, and then can just gently guide the whole flock of carts and it moves along with little human effort. It enables the employee to move dozens of carts at a time across the parking lot without very much physical risk of injury.