GROCERIES ARE NOT the only items being stolen from supermarkets. Shopping carts worth thousands of dollars are being pushed away annually.
So serious is the problem that one supermarket chain reported having to spend as much as $24 000 annually to replace stolen carts, while a major retailer has installed an expensive electronic security system to minimise the number of trolleys stolen.
Bertram Hall, managing director of Popular supermarkets, with branches in Spooners Hill, St Michael, and The City, said the theft of their carts was a headache.
He said yesterday that Popular had been replacing between 50 to 60 carts annually at a price of $400 each, including shipping and other duties.
“We’re looking at measures using an electronic system, but it is very expensive . . . . The challenge is Bridgetown,” he admitted, where losses had been heaviest.
Hall said if his business was to keep the price of their items affordable they had to lower their overheads, but would be challenged to do this if they had to continually replace shopping carts every year.
Terry Mahon, general manager of PriceSmart membership club in Green Hill, St Michael, declined to say how many trolleys they lost annually, but confirmed yesterday they had installed an electronic system to stem their losses.
“We implemented a cartronic system – it is an electronic system that locks the wheel of the trolleys once they go beyond a defined perimeter – to try to mitigate against those people who would come out to steal trolleys,” said Mahon.
He said since then their losses had been “significantly reduced”.
Explaining that trolleys were expensive and an asset to their business, Mahon said not having enough would impact on their service as every member who turned up to shop should have access to one, and that was why they had to move decisively to manage this challenge.
The cart theft was a concern too for Super Centre, the islands’s largest supermarket chain. Without going into details, general manager Neville Brewster however, said they were working to combat the problem.
Store manager of Cost-U-Less in Welches, St Thomas, Craig Cole, also said the theft of trolleys was a challenge but could not put a number on their losses.
“I heard once about one of our trolleys being seen as far as St Peter,” he said.
Cole said they constantly supervised their trolleys during the day and night.
One supermarket manager, who requested anonymity, said he would like the police to stop people they saw with these carts and ask them where they got them from, as they could not be bought like that. He noted that with a slowdown in business, operators could not afford to continue spending on such overheads.
Another retail manager pointed out the widespread nature of this expensive problem for supermarkets and how casually it was treated.
He said: “Your newspaper ran articles about the sanitation problems in the fish markets and not a single journalist thought it prudent to ask those vendors where they got the carts from.
“The bigger issue beyond the sanitation is where the carts were coming from. So that when the journalist was interviewing a fisherman who said he paid $200 for a cart, the question should have been from where.”
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