But I Needed to Get Home..I Had Frozen Items!

[RetailSlave]

A couple of years ago I was working the Service Desk when an older lady in one of our electric carts came up to the Service Desk and said she had lost her keys and had anyone turned them in. I checked Lost and Found..no keys. She said she would look around a bit more..15 minutes later she checked back again..still no keys. I sent one of the cashiers who weren't busy to walk the store and see if they could locate said keys. No luck. When the lady came back the 3rd time she was crying and upset..."How am I going to get home? I have all these groceries!" I offered to call someone for her..either a cab or a friend or relative that could give her a ride...she refused and rode away.

A few minutes later someone comes running in saying that they had just seen two of our cart boys leaving the parking lot. They told our Service Manager and she grabbed her truck keys and took off after them. Several minutes later she returned with the cart boys.
Turns out the cart boys had seen the customer drive out of the parking lot on the electric cart and start driving down the shoulder of the road and were following her in an effort to retrieve it. When our manager arrived the woman had reached the apartment building located behind the cinemas that share the same parking lot as our store. The woman admitted taking the cart and said that she had planned to just leave it in her yard overnight and call the store in the morning and report that "someone had left one of our carts in her yard." When confronted about the fact that she had taken store property she said, "But I needed to get home...I had frozen food." She could not understand that what she had done was theft of store property...even if she had intended to call and let us know where it was the next day (those Amigos don't like bad weather and we were expecting rain that night)..in her mind it was perfectly alright since she wasn't planning on keeping it and she needed to get home with her groceries.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Those amigos also don't like being driven outside. Something about the unevenness of the surface is bad for them.

I say they all need to have those wheels that lock up when you try to drive them past a certain point. What's the point of having them if inconsiderate people are going to be breaking them, and people who legitimately need them won't be able to use them because they're out for repairs all the time?

[Zellie Crescent]

The cart boys that work at my store wouldn't have followed her, they would have called the cops on her because like you said that's theft.

[bainsidhe]

I want to be sympathetic to her plight, but I agree the cops should have been called. The scooters at Walmart lock up once the battery dies. So the scooter would be rained/snowed on, plowed in and the wheels frozen up (no pun intended) after waiting until the next day. How ya gonna get a heavy thing like that back now?

I see people "borrow" shopping carts all the time to walk to the bus stop or their homes 3 blocks away. I hate this. I know it's expensive, but I personally think all shopping carts should have locking wheels.

[LillFilly]

Wow! Reminds me of the elderly folks who don't want you to call the ambulance because they don't want to pay for it; if she was close by, a cab would not have been too much.

I'm glad they caught her; I'd be worried for her safety driving that along the road!

[bhskittykatt]

The motel is about a block from a grocery store, and some guests will go shopping and carry their groceries back in the carts. This wouldn't be a problem if the next time they went shopping, they took the carts back with them. But no, they keep bringing back more and more carts and leaving them in our lot.

The grocery store has been making lots of cutbacks and doesn't have the staff to come over and claim the carts, so in order to keep our parking lot clear, we have to return them as we leave work. I usually wait for a few to pile up, then bring Hubby's truck down and load them all up so I only have to make one trip.

[RayvenQ]

I want to be sympathetic to her plight, but I agree the cops should have been called. The scooters at Walmart lock up once the battery dies. So the scooter would be rained/snowed on, plowed in and the wheels frozen up (no pun intended) after waiting until the next day. How ya gonna get a heavy thing like that back now?

I see people "borrow" shopping carts all the time to walk to the bus stop or their homes 3 blocks away. I hate this. I know it's expensive, but I personally think all shopping carts should have locking wheels.

Well, most scooters that I ran into when I worked for a charity that loaned them to people, have a lever lock somewhere that unlocks the wheels allowing you to push.

http://www.wheelchairmegastore.co.uk...scal_329le.jpg

were the mainstay of that place, those and 3 wheeler versions (which were damned nippy, it's kind of funny but also scary to see a OAP hold the forward lever when it is set at full speed and they're expecting it to be like speed 3 (out of about 10) but there was one there that, if you had to push, i swear had a dead weight more than a 1974 Honda motorbike.

[Bright_Star]

Wouldn't it be possible to make a cart that as soon as it leaves the perimeter of the store it powers down automatically? That would make stealing it impossible.

[Ironclad Alibi]

A couple of years ago I was working the Service Desk when an older lady in one of our electric carts came up to the Service Desk and said she had lost her keys and had anyone turned them in.

So, had her keys fallen to the floor of the electric cart and were being hidden by her feet? Or was she sitting on them?

[sprocket79]

(those Amigos don't like bad weather and we were expecting rain that night)

Today I was at Lowe's and I saw that someone had left one of those electric scooter carts in the parking lot. As soon as I went in the store I went to customer service and told someone that it was out there and someone should get it because it was going to rain soon. They thanked me and said they would send someone to go get it.

So I go do my shopping and check out about 20 mins later. The cart is still there!!! As I was walking out, I commented on it to my mom and she said I should tell this employee who was outside. He overheard us and asked what was the problem. I pointed to the electric cart and told him someone had taken it outside and that he should probably bring it in because it was going to rain any second. He vaguely said, "yeah" or something and wandered off. At that point I gave up. I informed the store TWICE and they didn't act. As I was driving off I saw the guy collecting other carts instead. By the time I got home 5 minutes later, it had started to rain.

I almost hope that cart is ruined because it would serve them right.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

To be fair to the cart guy, that thing would probably be a bitch to drag back into the store.

If that cart is anything like the swamp's motorized carts, the wheels lock up when the cart isn't in use. They're very hard to push on a tile floor. I can only imagine what it would be like to push it through our parking lot, which is a collection of various-sized potholes connected by narrow strips of asphalt and pavement. I wouldn't be too anxious to bring it back either. You'd be better off loading the thing on a trailer of some sort and driving it up closer to the entrance.

Like I said before, those things need to lock up before they get that far.

[Sarlon]

I agree with the idiots taking carts and leaving them anywhere BUT where they need to go...but asfor the motorized carts shutting off after a certain istance from the store...I don't know...

I often go shopping with my mother in Walmart and will often get the dirtiest looks from shoppers who see me, a person fully capable of walking without problems, take one of the scooters, drive it outside and out to a car, sometimes no where near a handicapped spot so my mother can get in it without walking the insane distances sometimes.

[Broomjockey]

I often go shopping with my mother in Walmart and will often get the dirtiest looks from shoppers who see me, a person fully capable of walking without problems, take one of the scooters, drive it outside and out to a car, sometimes no where near a handicapped spot so my mother can get in it without walking the insane distances sometimes.

I'm sorry, but that's still not a valid reason. If the wheels did lock up as they left the building, then you simply drop her at the entrance of the store, then go park, rather than parking, getting a cart, then going back.

[mattm04]

We will allow, with employee supervision, someone to drive them out the door to the concrete sidewalk. Once off the side walk you are on asphalt which slopes downhill. They do not have brakes in at cases in other stores have gone out of control and injured customers.

We have three destroyed, two in one week, when SCs drove them outside and left it in the rain. Keep in mind we only had two at the time. It took two weeks to get new ones in and when we had none one of the idiots who destroyed it complained about the lack of one, which caused Corp. to give him a GC. The other one was destroyed when a employee collecting carts saw a SC bring one out and politely told them not to do in in the future. The SC got in their car and pulled out quickly flipping the cart and damaging his car. Thankfully it was on tape and he got nothing out of it.

Thankfully they have cracked down on them recently at my store and they rarely make it outside. Since they are electric it would seem rather simple to have a"kill" system wired in to cut the power just outside the door.

[Kristev]

When I had to push shopping trolleys, I learned to hate the electric carts. Usually, when you're collecting trolleys, you have to be out there all the time in order to keep the work going, because if you slack off for even five minutes, your whole bay can go totally empty. There is no time to go riding around on an electric trolley that'll be out of power by the end of the day anyway, simply because no one will leave them alone long enough for their batteries to recover. And if you get stuck on a carryout, you can forget about catching your carts up. The morons who think their bought objects are a courtesy clerk's problem always insist on taking a long time before they leave and go away, especially if they're using an electric trolley.

So the electric trolleys, it quickly became clear, were nothing but a waste of my precious time that I should be using to actually do what used to be my job. The old farts who always seemed to get them, and the young turks who also used them constantly, this being Idaho, never actually needed them. This one old, brainless dipstick who loves to stir up trouble loves to ride his bicycle for miles, and then park himself in an electric trolley and ride all over the store. If he can use his legs enough to bike, he doesn't need to waste an electric trolley.

They're always getting left out in the rain, because my job simply refuses to hire enough courtesy clerks, and refuses to schedule enough people at any time.

Our electric trolleys don't last too long, because they're always running out of power. See, our store in the busiest in the region, largely because our store has practically driven out nearly all the competition, and as such, everyone shops here. And the old creeps insist on competing for the electric trolleys, so they never get a break. Except for the McDonalds crowd. The McDonalds crowd will take the electric trolleys, nearly all of them if they can, and simply park there in McDonalds for hours, preventing anyone who actually needs an electric cart (though I've come to learn that almost nobody needs them) can have one.

This being wilderness-based Idaho, though, there is always some young idiot with crutches or whatnot because he pretends he had a right to go out and despoil the wilderness, and Mother Nature simply wasn't having any of that . . . They need the electric carts. They also need brains. My mother needs one, but she knows how to use them.

Our electric trolleys don't have the ability to go outside for too long, because the parking lot damages them. They're only good for solid, level floors. On a hilled parking lot, they can't actually work well.

We've had Idahoans try to take them off the grounds before. These mindless country hicks all insist on using the electric trolleys wrong and breaking them. Oh, did I tell you about the time a pair of dumb teenagers decided to race through our store with them, and their mother just allowed it? Almost hit someone. Almost wish they had . . . oh well.

How many times have the courtesy clerks and greeters put "Do not use: Recharging" signs up, only to have them torn off. Can Idahoans read? Then they scream and raise quite the ruckus when the electric trolley runs out of power in the centre of the store.

Then the consumers get mad because the electric trolleys are all broken. It didn't take me more than three months to realize that, as far as work was concerned, those needless electric monstrousities should be outright banned.

By the way, never use the word customer. It implies they're there to be served. They aren't. Calling them consumers allows you to express as much contempt as you feel without being a bad worker.