Shopping cart thievery.

[dragon_wings]

That or an apartment complex, if there's one within walking/crawling distance.

Back in the days at WD, the first store I worked at was in between a middle class neighborhood and a public housing complex. Our store manager and Produce Manager (who both owned pickup trucks) would make a weekly run next door to the apartments to round up all our shopping carts and bring them back.

They'd not only find the out in plain view on the walkways, in the grassy areas between walkways or in the parking areas but also in the wooded area that bordered the complex at the road between us and them.

There's rumors going around that one of the neighboring apartment complexes has a bunch. I know there isn't any in my complex, though there are some from the local grocery store. And an older lady that came in a few days ago called back later that night to talk to a manager and informed him that often times the old folks with take carts home with them to the retirement home so they'll have a cart next time they come in.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Shopping cart theft doesn't happen too much at the wholesale club. Or if it does, we have so many it's hard for us to notice. Most of the time, they'll just turn up in some other store's corral and will eventually be rounded up and returned to us.

Weirdest case of shopping cart theft I ever saw was actually more of a weird "donation" of a cart. We've changed the design of our carts twice since I started working for the club. First from smallPlastic to biggerPlastic then to sturdyMetal. Before we changed to biggerPlastic, we had a cart mixed in with all of ours. Same color, same design. But the store name on the side of the cart was for <rival chain>.

No one knows how it got in our lot. Their nearest location was a couple miles away, across two pretty major thoroughfares. I always used to joke that they [rival chain] had planted it in our lot to "subvert our customers."