things that are mildlyinteresting

My local store uses these but they lock up if you bring them out to the 2nd row of parking spaces out front. It's enough to get the cart to your car, then you go to return it and it's totally locked, so everyone just shoves them into the planters in a big pile of tipped over carts instead of physically lifting the whole thing and hefting it to the cart returns to return it. The store has signs everywhere now telling people not to throw carts into the planters, and the employees know the problem, and the city has evidently complained multiple times, but district management evidently refuses to believe it's got anything to do with the cart locks and I was told by an exasperated checker that they're apparently considering getting security guards to confront people and make them return carts?? lmaooo

some models use a wire in the ground that emits a low frequency radio signal... which can be also be transmitted by the speaker in a phone by simply playing these mp3 files: https://www.tmplab.org/2008/06/18/consumer-b-gone/ (!)

Those things have been around for a long time.

Many grocery stores in my area have these wheel locks. If I recall from college, if you took the cart out of the parking lot by carrying it over the plant beds, the lock would not engage.

The safeway near my apartment is so ghetto the wheels lock as soon as you leave the store exit. You have to take everything in one trip or wait for your car to pull around to load.

Must be working. I haven't seen a cart on cinder blocks in a while.

Pretty much every store in my city has these, didn't realize they weren't a thing everywhere.

Bubbles would be really disappointed

If places where I am in the UK don't have this, they have a coin return on them.

for the small price of a hex head wrench, you too can be the owner of a proud new Walmart shopping cart…. I wonder if walmart sells replacement wheels.

It depends on the exact location of the store... pretty common in urban areas. Makes sense as carts cost hundreds of dollars and people will just walk off with them and ditch them once they get home, or of course homeless people often take them and use them for a while. First time I saw this was in Uptown Minneapolis about 20 years ago. Seen them all over since then. I found a brand new Safeway cart in the alley behind my house and was 'great!'. I wheeled it into my yard and then wondered wtf I was planning to do with it exactly. Apparently, if you call them they have someone who goes around picking up carts, so I let them know and someone from the store came and got it.

these are pretty common at supercenters in Chicagoland

I've only ever seen these in malls so you don't take the carts to other places in the mall. Do they really use these for carts going out to the parking lot too? How're you supposed to get your groceries out of the store?

There is a walmart locally that has these or used to have them. Theirs were easy enough to disable.

We've had these in the UK for a long time, mainly to stop people carting shopping home using the trolley and then abandoning it.

Do you know how it works? Doesn't seem to be electronic or so... Perhaps mechanical magnet based or so

Was I the only one who thought the wheel was laying on the ground?