Which Canadian grocery chain locks up its carts like ALDI?

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joeekaitis

joeekaitis

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So, I'm watching The Red Green Show and Steve Smith who plays Red Green is making another of his improbable creations requiring a shopping cart as one of its parts and blurts out "You'll find them in front of (I wasn't paying full attention and missed the name).  They're only a quarter."

 

Immediately I thought of ALDI but ALDI isn't in Canada.  So, friends in The Great White North, which grocery chain might it be?

 

Thanks, eh.
 
Near all of them require a coin. There's I think 3 big chains that operate numerous stores each under different banners. The biggest being Loblaws Co. with their Loblaws, Superstore, Zehrs, Valu Mart, No Frills, etc. Then Sobey's who have Sobeys, and I think Metro (which were A&P's) Out west was Safeway but I think they're part of some other chain now.

The smaller valu mart near us doesn't require any coins. It's the only one I can think of.
 
The very idea of a store charging the customer to use a grocery cart is preposterous! For cryin’ out loud every week I load up a cart at Target with $100 to $120 worth of groceries and other merchandise!

If they expect a quarter to use the freakin’ cart they can keep their GD merchandise and I’ll trade elsewhere! What’s next? A fee to park your car at the grocery store, a surcharge to have a checker bag your groceries, a coin slot on the restroom door?

Everything already costs and arm and a leg, while a quarter may seem like not very much, it’s the principle of making a customer pay for the use of the very item that makes it possible for a customer to spend vast amounts of money for the “privilege” of spending hundreds of dollars in their establishment.

Eddie
 
As Louis stated above, it's a quarter lock keychain that mechanically accepts and returns the quarter.



The claim is this eliminates staff/positions which allows the company to reduce prices. In reality, it probably just increases their profits to a higher percentage vs. staff elimination. Businesses are always trying to find an angle to make a profit at the customers labor expense. Think self checkout lanes.
 
Regardless if it’s only a deposit it’s still an unnecessary nuisance. Many people these days pay for most everything with a card and don’t have change in their pocket or purse. Plus, when the cart is returned is there an attendant that dispenses the refund, or is there an automated process that dispenses the refund?

To me it just says cheap. If the quarter deposit is supposed to be a method of preventing folks from walking off the lot with the grocery cart it’s not nearly what the cart is worth. Lots of homeless people would gladly spend a quarter to walk off with a cart that can hold most of their worldly processions so it wouldn’t be much of a deterrent to prevent the theft of carts.

Eddie
 
Requiring a deposit to use a shopping cart

This is an absolutely genius system, I remember reading some years ago how many hundreds of thousands of dollars saves in claims for damage from shopping carts that hit customers cars alone of course it saves an employee at every store, pushing carts back and putting them away and that expensive motorized machine that pushes dozens of carts back at a time.

My father was in the grocery business His whole life and I remember him telling us his kids how much shopping carts cost and how if store loses one it's a huge loss of profits, even when I was a kid a shopping cart cost nearly $100. It's probably a couple hundred today by keeping them flowing back to the store smoothly there's less theft of the carts.

I find its an absolutely wonderful system. It promotes a wonderful interaction with people,often when you're returning your cart I give it to somebody else and they feel like they've won something because they don't have to invest a quarter a lot of time somebody will just give me the cart as I'm walking to the store and then I always give it to somebody else sort of pass on your good fortune. About a half dozen times in the last six or eight years. I didn't have a quarter with me and if you just walk into the store, the cashier will give you a quarter for nothing. They won't even ask you for a dollar and make change.

It's nice because there's never any shopping carts floating around the parking lot. There's often a person that just is pushing the carts back to get the quarters if I'm in a hurry as I was the other day, I just left the cart and somebody just snatched it up and took it back for the quarter.

This is just one of the many reasons why Aldi's has such low prices and excellent quality I am amazed almost every time I go shopping there how little groceries cost it seems like every time I go prices are lower on this key items that I buy often. I can still fill a whole shopping cart and sell them spend over $120

John
 
Twenty-five cents isn't much of a deterrent but one reason why supermarkets place a deposit on carts is so they are returned.

No end of shopping carts past and still today are taken by homeless and anyone else for various purposes. Then you have those who use carts to take things to motor vehicles parked wherever, but don't return them to proper place. Thus again either carts are stolen or someone from supermarket staff has to go out and round them up.

In more suburban area that one grew up in many supermarkets had a type of barricade at curb. People could fit through but not shopping carts. One had to either take things out of cart and carry to parking lot or wherever, or someone remained with cart while someone else went to fetch car.

Those carts can be dangerous in wrong hands. People with nothing better to do would play about in parking lot shoving them into parked vehicles.
 
Twenty-five cents is cheap for a shopping trolly, that's only about the equivalent of a 20p coin. Here in the UK they are a pound at the shops that use the coin lock trolleys, so 5 times as much.

One of the stores I shop at had a couple of people handing out £1 coin tokens to customers for the first couple of weeks when they introduced coin locks years ago. Another, a discount place always leaves at least a couple of unlocked trolleys for their customers to use, probably so they don't lose customers who don't have a pound coin on them, and most of the shoppers at Lidl when I've been in there, use their tall plastic baskets on wheels instead of the locked trolleys and carry their purchases to the car.

A lot of people carry tokens, or a trolley key or a tool to release the coin, so I'm not sure they are that effective.
 
Here in the "Homeland" of locked shopping carts a lot of people also prefer tokens to coins and surprisingly everybody still seems to return their carts.
You really never see a stray cart on the parking lot and if you do it`s a very rare sight.
Might be because of a sentimental to the tokens (I`ve been using the same ones for years and even have a favorite one among them) or just because education of the lock and chain system worked as intended.
Or a combination of both.

Lots of Germans also have the habit of "parking" their cart somewhere in the store and then stroll around to gather their stuff "by foot".
If you have a Euro coin in your cart and are just about to start filling it then there`s a higher risk of cart-kidnapping compared to a cart that only shows a plastic chip in the coin slot.

In the States if you`re leaving your cart unattended for longer than a minute there`s a high risk that the store`s staff will unload it immediately and you have to start shopping all over again. LOL
 
It could be a dollar coin here now . It does keep the majority of cars being put back into the "cart corals" out in the parking lots rather than just left sitting where the car used to be. You aren't hiking the thing back to the store. Still in all homeless people are taking them moreso than ever.. I think some stores have locking wheels on them once they leave the perimeter of the parking lot.
 
“Still in all homeless people are taking them moreso than ever”

Well if it only costs a homeless person a quarter to unlock a shopping cart that they can then take off the property and use for the storage and transport of pretty much all of their worldly possessions that’s a small price to pay for the for this convenience.

In my area many of the large stores that sell groceries have a transmitter that causes the wheels to lock if the carts are removed from their parking lot. Most of the carts stay in the parking lots because of this, and no “deposit”is required to keep the carts on the lot.

I completely understand the problem there is of folks stealing these carts and the cost for the stores. However I still believe that requiring customers to pay a deposit is an unnecessary hassle. Lots of people simply don’t carry change anymore. So then if you find yourself at the grocery store and don’t have a quarter or a token you’ll have to hoof it into the store, get change and then hoof it back out to the parking lot to get a freaking cart. I don’t know about everyone else, but shopping for groceries is a chore that I want to get done as quickly as possible. And it costs PLENTY! Adding any other steps just adds to the aggravation. If that makes me an old coot I’ll own the moniker.

Making shopping more difficult is one of the things that is causing the tremendous number of folks shopping online and the demise of “brick and mortar” stores. Make shopping easier, not more aggravating.

Eddie
 
Today I shopped at the biggest store of my favourite supermarket chain. The shopping carts at this store don’t require a deposit. Still everyone brings back the cart to where it belongs. I guess the system trained people well.

I usually have my groceries delivered but because of the holidays I decided to do some shopping myself. Good grief, what a nightmare! It was very busy which also meant that some products were sold out. I didn’t get all the things I wanted. And then dragging a heavy bag of groceries from the car into my apartment. It wasn’t a great experience. I’m going back to ordering soon!!
 
Yes I quit shopping at Undies, I mean Aldis/Aldi's, I me

Well I didn't have a quarter one time when I was lugging my combination automotive infant seat and seat to safely carry my newborn in, and the seat was clearly designed to just stay in my car given the weight of it empty, and if Laura had been able to walk or I could let her crawl around with me it could have carried the groceries in I was juggling under the free arm and switching things back and forth ro and from the tired arm carrying the seat...

 

A quarter I needed to pay for the milk I was buying which I found I didn't need the cart for was locked in the deposit lock, which meant bringing the cart all the way to the corral in the store to get the quarter out and pay for my jug still sitting there holding up the one line Aldi seems to even pride itself on one register open at, a/la its competitors... No one else volunteered to just chain a cart onto mine to free the quarter and just bring both back so my order could be paid...

 

Someone actually gave me that cart in the parking lot, but insisted I give him the quarter for it he had to pay, whereas you'd be surprised by the number of people who actually reward you with their quarters saving them a trip bringing back their carts and giving you their used carts quarter and all... Which even I had graciously and numerous times had done!

 

 

 

-- Dave

 

 

 

 
 

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