PHOENIX (AZFamily)<\/b> \u2014 The city of Phoenix is implementing a new law this week to hold businesses accountable for abandoned shopping carts scattered throughout local neighborhoods.<\/p>\n
The shopping cart ordinance goes into effect Thursday to force retailers to do a better job<\/a> tracking their carts and preventing them from wandering off.<\/p>\n For years, abandoned shopping carts have been found in alleyways, next to bus stops and dumped in canals throughout the city.<\/p>\n \u201cI see them everywhere in neighborhoods, especially my neighborhood,\u201d said one Phoenix resident.<\/p>\n Another resident said most of the time, homeless people take the carts for items and then leave them in strange places.<\/p>\n City collects thousands of carts annually<\/p>\n Abandoned shopping carts are a serious problem, with the city of Phoenix collecting between 7,000 and 8,000 ditched carts from city streets every year.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve had carts go 5 to 10 miles away from their original location,\u201d said Lisa Bednar, president of the Arizona Food Marketing Alliance.<\/p>\n Most large grocery chains support Phoenix\u2019s new law and already have systems in place to protect their carts, Bednar said. They have services that track them down and have equipped many of their carts with wheel locking devices that make it difficult to roll them away.<\/p>\n New technology helps track carts<\/p>\n There\u2019s also new technology being tested to locate missing carts.<\/p>\n \u201cThey actually have GPS trackers on the carts and so the retrieval services are actually able to pinpoint where to pick up the carts instead of it being an easter egg hunt where they are driving around doing sweeps looking for carts,\u201d Bednar said.<\/p>\n Phoenix\u2019s new ordinance requires all businesses that provide shopping carts to their customers to complete an annual certification and to have a management plan in place to track their carts.<\/p>\n City officials say they want to work with smaller retailers to ensure they comply with the new guidelines without financial hardship.<\/p>\n \u201cSimilar to large retailers, smaller retailers are not responsible to install locking mechanisms or put out significant money. They just have to outline how they meet objectives of the city,\u201d said Lucas Mariacher, Phoenix\u2019s deputy director of neighborhood services.<\/p>\n Stores could be fined between $25 to $50 for every cart returned by the city.<\/p>\n A hotline, 1-800-THE-CART<\/a>, been set up for the public to report abandoned shopping carts found in neighborhoods.<\/p>\n See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it<\/a>.<\/p>\n