Shopping Trolley/Shopping Cart Coins

As I was looking around for something to print on my 3D printer at work, I came across these weird 'tokens and devices' that people were making to spoof coins for shopping carts.

These is my question and pardon my American ignorance....(please just one more time)

1) In your country, do people have to PAY to use a shopping cart/shopping trolley in a super market?

2) Are you supped to pay and does EVERYONE use these fake tokens

3) Does anyone in the US have this system at a super market? (I think we would riot if they locked up the carts in New England)

I have never seen a device like that but, where I live (in Canada), grocery stores usually require you to use either a quarter or a loonie (one dollar coin) in order to unlock the cart. You get the coin back when you return the cart. I think the idea is to encourage people to return their carts to the cart area and prevent them from being scattered around the parking lot. I don't really see the point of this device since you would return your cart to get the device back. I guess it helps if you don't have an appropriate coin on you? I have never seen somebody use one of these.

I'm Canadian, but my experience should be the same as my southern neighbours:

You get your coin back when you return the cart and put the cart locking mechanism back into place.

My supermarket of choice used to sell a fake coin that goes on your keychain (I bought one - the store even donated the proceeds from the fake coin to their children's charity), so I never have to worry about having change on-hand. There's really no reason to use a fake coin other than the convenience factor (or if you're some sort of miscreant who wants to horde shopping carts or do something else nefarious).

edit: My understanding is that the cart locking is not so much for people actually stealing carts; it's that some people walk them across 2-3 neighbourhoods to get their groceries home and then the stores need to hire people to go all over and re-collect the damn things (not to mention, it pisses off the public to see carts abandoned all over the place which is bad for PR).

I've not seen them on trolleys in a good 10+ years but yeah. You put a quid in the unlock the trolley, and you get the quid back when you take the trolley back, as to encourage assholes to not just dump the trolley wherever they feel.

I only see those at Aldi here in the U.S Midwest but yea it's pretty much the same as everyone else, put in a quarter to get the cart and you get it back when you return it. It's supposed to keep costs down since you don't need a guy who's job it is to wrangle carts down.

Thanks. You seem to have explained the parts I wasn't getting...like what it was supposed to "encourage people to do". It appears this is like what they do at airports with luggage carts....(maybe?)

In the US the division of labor in a super market is that they people who do bagging, bring shopping bags to the register area, and collection carts are all done by the same people. I would guess it might be the same in Canada. Of course, there are never enough beggars or people collecting carts. It does gives some valuable jobs to people who need jobs.

@monkeyking1969: We have these in on our trolleys here in Ireland. You don't "pay" to use the trolley, you put a coin into the trolley and then when you're finished with the trolley you bring it back to the other trolleys and push your coin back out when you link the trolley you used to the other ones.

It's a method that stops people stealing trolleys, stops people not returning them to the dock for others to use and stops people taking them if they don't really need them.

Here in the Netherlands we have carts you can either unlock with a real coin or a coin-shaped logo you can get from the supermarket itself. When you deposit the cart, you link it together to other carts and make the coin pop out.

I'm Swedish, and yeah, shopping carts generally have slots for 5 or 10 SEK coins (roughly $0.50 and 1), which you of course are given back when you re-attach the cart to the chain at the entrance, and there are tokens of the same sizes as the coins that many people use. Even stores hand out tokens with the company brand on it, so using tokens instead of coins isn't really looked down upon as long as you don't break the coin slot to steal the cart or anything.

A few stores use carts without coin slots, but with wheels that'll lock if they are taken outside the store instead, but for the most part it's of the regular kind with deposits.

I figured people all over the world used carts like I did...

....your know toss'em in the harbor.

Maybe it's because I've never lived north of the Texas panhandle, but I've never even heard of "paying" for shopping carts. Every store I've been to just has them sitting right past the entrance where you grab one, do your shopping, and push it to your car. I was taught to put them in, I guess "staging area" would be the best term, some of the parking spots had two long rows that you are supposed to put the cart in when you're done. In any case, I put the cart there after it's unloaded and one of the employees would push the whole long line of the back to the entrance once it filled up.

Yeah, Aldi's is the only chain that I seen this style of shopping cart at.

Here in Australia, shopping trolleys have been like this for as long as I can remember. A dollar coin will release it for use, and returning it nets you the dollar back. When I worked for a supermarket, we had our own fake-coin thingies, but I've never seen a regular person with one. That said, I haven't really been looking for it.

Wtf I've never had to pay to use a cart that's insane. I've really never heard of this before. I live in the North West of the us.

Yeah, I've only seen it at Aldi's in the US, as others have said. The simple fact that it keeps people from leaving the carts in parking spaces and everywhere kinda makes me wish every store used that system.

Northeastern US over here and I have never seen anything like this. Seems crazy to me. There's no mass cart anarchy over here.

I'm saying this as someone with a cousin who got arrested when him and his buddies took a cart and rolled i down a big hill road in the middle of the night.

That's it one cart incident due to bored teens. So maybe if you are rampant with bored teens I guess I could see the appeal. But that system wouldn't stop bored teens anyways.

@devil240z: You're not actually paying for the cart. When you're done shopping, you put the cart back and the coin pops back out.

@onemanarmyy: okay I understand that now. But still the entire concept is 100% alien to me. It's like not pumping your own gas,except I've heard of that before but I've never been to a place that does it for you. Like how do you get gas in the middle of the night?

as an american I can firmly say "Da hell iz doze?"

@devil240z: I live in Oregon where you're not supposed to pump your own gas at all and you either have to find a station that is open 24/7 or plan ahead and get some before most stations close.

@grapesoda: That's so crazy to me and I live in Washington so it's not even that far away.

@dudeglove: As a dumb teenager growing up in a council estate in Dublin, finding a loose trolley was like Christmas day for fooling around in.

I live in Texas and I have literally never heard of this before this thread.

We have the same system in Denmark as well. And I actually have a fake coin that I got from chasing someone off who was trying to rob the supermarket where I worked. Dude had used a fake coin on the trolley he was stashing stuff in.

I've seen it some places here in the UK but it's not everywhere. Normally you put in a pound coin, and then when you are done with the trolly you can get the £1 back.

I have also seen replacement tokens for it like what is in the OP. Weirdly, I think I got one in exchange for donating a pound coin for a pets charity. So I just use the little replacement token now.

Also I love this thread. Stuff like this is interesting, despite being kinda banal.

It's supposedly done more to cut costs than anything else. The store has less employees to pay, which equates to better prices for customers. The only place I've seen it at, Aldi's, is considered a discount supermarket. From what I've seen they typically have one or two cash registers open. The cashier/s bag the groceries, and none of them have to leave their register to go collect carts. The cashiers also have chairs to sit in.

Yeah, not being able to pump your own gas is weird.

WTF they have Aldi in America? Mind blown.

It's pretty common to have those little tokens on a little magnet on your keychain for convenience (excuse the pun). You just pop it out of it's holder and slot it in, no fumbling around in your pocket/wallet for change or even worse having to go to a shop to get the appropriate change. I've seen people use them in both Europe and Australia.

Welcome to Oregon. Which I believe is now the only state where you can't pump your own gas, except for a few situations when you can.

@pdxsonic: Also New Jersey where we somehow can't pump our own gas and simultaneously have some of the lowest gas prices in the nation.

Yep, Aldi is the only chain here in Michigan that uses the little coin thing.

On a similar note, people that don't return their carts to the little parking lot corrals are filthy dirt bags that should be kept locked away from society.

Most supermarkets here do it, one of the few which doesn't has a couple of Downs Syndrome guys who collect the trolleys so if they were to implement the £1 token thing, there's be an uproar as jobs would be lost.

EDIT - I've got a token on my keychain. This awful little scrote:

I had a cool HAL from 2001 one, but that got stuck in a trolley. :(

Yeah I personally think it's a great system, I pretty much never see loose carts at the grocery stores around my area which all use this system but the walmarts and home depots are littered with carts that I have more than once had to dart after to stop the wind from blowing into some innocent persons car because some inconsiderate asshole is too lazy to walk 50 ft

Around here in Portugal you have some carts that don't need money and, for the rest of the carts, you can use either a real coin or a plastic coin (supermarkets give them away for free or some companies give them away with their logo, as marketing). You only need it to use the cart. Once you put the cart back in place, the coin comes out. You don't have to pay for anything and everyone puts them back in place*.

*except on "Latada" here in my city, one of the two big "parades" made by College students, where lots of carts are stolen to be used as a device to carry a shit-ton of booze to drink during the parade. People never put them back in place but usually at the end of the parade there's people that collects them.

Never seen this on the west coast of the U.S. but now that I know it exists I wouldn't be surprised to see stores attempt to bring the system in and I wouldn't be surprised to see people be violently against it.

In Missouri, and I'll mirror that I've only ever seen these at Aldis.