Letters to the editor

I would be interested to know if other v alley residents feel the same way as me about the dreaded shopping cart.

Aside from the small dent left in my car’s door panel by an abandoned cart , the use and abuse of these contraptions is a nightmare.

The shopping cart villain spans all ages, classes, races and sexes. Frail old ladies take on a frightening new persona as they steer them into fellow shoppers’ shins; vandals and thieves steal them for joy-riding, leaving them abandoned and wrecked at the roadside ; vagrants proudly load them with their worldly goods .

Why do retailers employ an army of staff solely to collect their carts from every corner of the parking lot when they could be easily and more cost-effectively collected from designated cart stowage s? Worse still, why do retailers seemingly accept that their carts will be stolen ? Why don’t patrol cops stop and apprehend those clearly in possession of stolen property, or are carts given free with every full grocery purchase? Do these uncontrollable four-wheeled monstrosities have a value, and is not the cost of their collection, repair or replacement passed on to the customer through higher prices?

Anyone that has visited a large DIY store or supermarket in Europe will know that to use a trolley (that’s what they’re called over there), a refundable coin has to be used to free the thing from a chained lock; why can’t a similar scheme be adopted here? The 25-cent coin may be too low to deter people from abandoning them, or thieves from wheeling them away, but maybe a suitable token that would open a chained lock could be sold for a dollar or two at the store’s customer services or check-outs; the token then recovered for use another day when the infernal thing is returned to its stowage after use and relocked.

Carlo Pritchard

Las Vegas