• Ephera@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    I believe, that would only really be a thing in the US? In most other countries, we have coin locks on the shopping carts, so you can only get them from the corral by inserting a coin into the shopping cart, and you only get your coin back when you return the shopping cart to the corral…

    • dou9m@lemmy.ca
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      15 hours ago

      Americans don’t carry coins due to a lack of money so this wouldn’t work for us, you’d need to get subscription based cart rentals for us to start making progress in this regard

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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        13 hours ago

        I mean, we do also have these kind of things:

        Coin-sized plastic chip with a holder, for attaching to a keychain.

        Companies print their branding on them and then hand them out to advertise for themselves, which definitely sounds like it would fit into the American way of life…

        • dou9m@lemmy.ca
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          13 hours ago

          Legitimately: not enough grift for our oligarch emperors to profit off this

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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        5 days ago

        Yeah, I might specifically remember the US not usually having them, because they invented/popularized shopping carts, which always feels kind of backwards that they’re using a simpler version.

        Wikipedia has at least some info on the distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_cart#Deposits

        (And I can confirm that here in Germany, you practically cannot find shopping carts without coin locks. I’m not sure, if I’ve ever seen one TBH.)

        • boonhet@lemmy.zip
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          4 days ago

          I’ve never seen it except for in Lidl here in Estonia. Most people return their carts anyway.

      • lividweasel@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        To increase your sample size, these seem to be rare where I am in western Canada. The only store I can think of that used to have them removed them at least a decade ago.

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      I’ve never seen this happen, I live in the US. I see abandoned carts in the parking lot not far from the return area all the time, but not just randomly in the store.

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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        5 days ago

        Where I live, I’d say there’s on average one cart with a broken lock per corral. But they’re also usually at the front of the corral, so you still end up with them relatively often…