In the United States carts are free. You collect a cart at the entrance to the store, and return the cart to a cart corral in the parking lot next to your car. Then a worker from the store periodically goes out to the corral to collect the carts and return them to the store entrance.

In California you run the cart up a curb, leave it in an empty parking space, or maybe give it a gentle push and let it roam free. Corrals are depots for broken and rusted carts.

… /s.

I really hate trying to turn into a spot that's flanked by two SUVs only to find a cart in the way. People are incredibly lazy. I love the ALDI's quarter scheme… it's just enough of a nudge to get people to do the decent thing.

I find that funny because we were taught growing up that leaving your cart out keeps the cart-collecting people employed, kind of like refusing to use the self-service checkout -- a different decent thing!

The carts still need collecting. And at least when I worked at K-Mart in the 1990s, there was no dedicated cart collecting person; it was the task of whoever had the free time, usually someone handling stocking, typically junior, and especially someone young (though these days they have the electric carts).

What you were told sounds like one of those slightly tongue-in-cheek excuses people sometimes use to justify behavior, though that doesn't necessarily make it insincere. For most of high school I worked dishwashing jobs. A typical task for a dishwasher includes picking up trash in the parking lot. People throwing trash in the parking lot weren't doing me or anyone else any favors.

I never heard that one but my mom refused to learn how to use ATMs because she wanted to have tellers. Same with any sort of self-scan groceries. And Oregon is one of two states where you can't pump your own gas.

Do you do that consistently now that you're an adult? Do you bus your own tables at local restaurants (small business owner) but not at franchise restaurants?

It's been a quarter for at least the last 18 years. You'd think with all the inflation that's happened over the years they'd have to increase the deposit at some point.

The coin thing is free too, it's just so people have to put the cart back to collect their coin (usually 1 or 2 euros). I wish we had it in the US, people are freaking idiots and leave carts all over the place in the parking lot.

Carts are free at Aldi too. You just put a coin in to release a cart, and when you return your cart, you get your coin back.

They aren’t free if you don’t have a quarter on hand.

Well they aren't really for sale or rent either. Not sure what your point is?

I never, ever carry change.

In germany, paying with hard cash is still very common, having some change is basically the norm (you can also use plastic tokens instead of real coins, you can get those for free from a lot of places here, including the shop themselves, either as promotion or if you ask)

If you visit Aldi at all regularly, you just keep a quarter in the car's change drawer.

Why not? Cash is divisible, readily accepted, and anonymous.

Today for the first time in two months I went to a retailer that was cash only. I haven't carried my wallet with me for two months - I just leave it at home and use Apple Pay for literally everything, including public transport.

But then, I also don't shop at Aldi or need a trolley.

Credit card fees are included in every purchase. I typically end up with 20 to 100 bucks every month. If I use that for travel I get even more. Twenty dollars in cash tends to last me an entire month.

And needs to be acquired and carried. I don’t like coins, the weight and noise of them.

I also don’t carry things in my pockets.

The fees associated with debit card transactions don’t land on me, so...

It does land on you via higher prices. Nothing in life is free.

Actually, the cost of handling cash, for stores, is more than debit.

Maybe not intentionally, but it was a pretty good pun.

Pun? I missed it - ELI5 please!

It takes a quarter to free one from its chain.

OK, I'm genuinely curious, why the downvotes? Did I accidentally invoke some sensitive imagery?

Not sure, but perhaps because it's not actually a pun?! At least I still don't get it.

Free as in beer vs free as in speech.

You don’t need a quarter, just something quarter-sized. Google “shopping cart coin keychain” for examples.

Quite right; my family has a few plastic "coins" that work just as well.

Here in the UK, shopping carts used to take a £1 coin, which incidentally had very similar geometry to the Indian 5 rupee coin (worth about 5 pence) - that was a great little find for our family, who always had a few 5 rupee coins lying around from our time visiting family in India. Sadly they updated the design of the £1 coin, so this trick no longer works.

Just about any store around here that uses the coin system also hands out free "cart coins" if you ask the service desk.

One thing that enables this to work for Aldi is their parking lots are much smaller than most grocery stores. You're walking maybe 100 ft round trip to return your cart, whereas it could be several hundred feet at larger stores with giant parking lots.

There are a few corrals throughout the parking lot where customers are expected to deposit their carts. The store then has someone who goes around from time to time to retrieve a row of them and push it back to the front of the store. It's often a job given to somebody mentally handicapped who can't do a lot of other things at the store.

Publix gives the job to the bagger/loader, who is usually a friendly person. This person bags your groceries, then offers to take them to your car and help you load them into your car. If you accept the help, then as they return back to the store they bring in the carts.

I never take them up on their offer, I would rather leave the service for the elderly, handicapped, or extremely pregnant women.

As others have said, in the US you leave it in the parking lot, hopefully in a cart return thing.

Honestly, having to put a coin in to get a cart would mean I would likely never get a cart. I never pay with cash, and thus I never have coins with me, so I would be limited to whatever I could carry. This is obviously bad for business, so I think businesses just eat the cost of having an employee round up the carts.

Then again, I hate seeing carts everywhere, and sometimes find myself returning a few because they're such a nuisance. If this solves the problem, I might consider leaving a coin in my wallet to shop at Aldi instead of my cart-ridden local grocery store.

Most people in Europe have a coin in their car for this purpose (usually a plastic one that the supermarkets give out). You park and grab the coin before leaving the car, simple.

The alternative, which was current when I was growing up in Germany, was to just have no such mechanism at all. People would just behave.

This thing was introduced in France, because the French customers had another attitude to it and that got extrapolated by the huge French hipermarché concept.

Most of the IKEAs I have been to in Germany don't do this. They have a couple of poorly payed workers who do nothing else all day than collect carts from the parking space.

Tho IKEA works on a different scale compared to most grocers in Germany, their stores are always extremely busy, particularly on Saturdays and they handle a lot bigger wares which means customers having a trolley, sometimes even multiple of them is a more regular occurrence.

With that kind of throughput and the involved logistics of bigger pieces handed out on a trolley at the order counter, introducing the money deposit for the trolleys would massively slow down everything, possibly creating waiting lines at trolley stations as they sometimes happen during busy times at grocers.

At least the employes collecting the carts have electrical little pushing cars, enabling them to push impressively long "snakes" of trolleys.

In the US I have never had to deposit any money to use a cart. I'm not sure how that would even work, is it some automated machine that spits out a cart?

They are linked by chains: every cart has a coin-operated lock accepting a chain and a chain for the next cart to connect.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Pf...

Put a coin in the drawer and close it, the chain of the next cart pops out the back and you can take it. On return, you push the chain back in, the drawer pops open and you get your coin back.

Store employees just occasionally balance cart numbers between the corrals, if there's multiple.

No, it's much simpler than you are probably imagining. The cart locks to the one in front using a short chain with a plug between a device attached to the handlebars of each cart. It comes out of the back of one and locks into the front of the other.

Put a coin(or any coin shaped object) in and a simple mechanic latch releases the chain, plug it back in and you get your coin back.

Theres a coin activated mechanical lock on each cart, carts are stacked and chained together by these locks.

To get one, you insert a coin (or a plastic token - these are usually given away as freebies by many companies if not the stores themselves) and that unlocks the chain.

It's not about the money, no one earns anything from this. It's about putting something that you own (can be worthless, the emotion counts) in the cart which you can only possibly get back if you return the cart to any number of bays on the parking lot or next to the entrance.

The handle of each cart has a lock and a small chain. Initially the carts are stacked inside each other, with the chain locked in the lock of the next cart. If you put a coin (or other round flat object like the handle of a key) into the lock you can remove the chain and use the cart. When you return the cart you insert the chain from another cart and get your coin back. It's a very simple and robust mechanism.

You insert a coin into a slot in the cart, and a chained key releases the cart from the next cart it's chained to. When you want your coin back, you return it to the line of carts, stack it and then insert the key from the next cart into yours. Your coin is released and the store doesn't have to pay someone to collect them.

It's similar to the "SmartECart" luggage cart kiosks you may have seen at airports. Sliding a cart in locks it in place on a set of rails, depositing the money releases a mechanical catch on the end, allowing you to pull one cart out.

You might be thinking of this system used by Ikea. https://youtu.be/JRXdlgBe8wg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smarte_Carte looks like it might be the airport system you have in mind.

The usual European shopping cart system works with a coin deposit, chains and mechanical locks on each cart, as described in several other comments.

not sure why 10 people needed to answer your question lol

Trader Joe's has a yellow line beyond which you are not supposed to take your cart. I was always wondering how this works so I pushed a cart behind the line. It immediately locked its wheels so it got stuck there. I guess some employee knows how to unlock these carts.

Usually there are return bays spread throughout the carpark where you can theoretically return trolleys/carts and they'll be taken back en-masse by a store employee later.

Often this results in them being left all over the place or stolen though.

In most supermarkets in the US you just leave your cart in the parking lot after you load up your trunk. They have people who then come and collect the carts.

No it's a common courtesy to put them in a coral or return them to the entrance (if it's a small lot). You aren't supposed just leave them in the parking lot just drift and bang into people's cars and block spaces. That's just lazy.

People leave there carts in the lots and workers collect them

In my experience, people leave their carts in the designated spot, mostly well nested. And a store clerk has to come out for about 5 minutes to bring them back every hour or so.

I don't feel like that amount of labor is a tremendous cost for the supermarket.

I worked at at supermarket when I was young. Even when people left the carts in the best possible locations, it was still way more than 5 minutes per hour that we spent out there. Sometimes 2 of us would spent 10 minutes each per hour, but more likely one of us would be our there for 20-30 minutes per hour, especially during busy times.

And that's when the cart collectors were being quick and not just out there fooling around.

In addition, if things got busy inside and we forgot to collect carts for a while, we'd run out and customers would get upset that they didn't have a cart to use. This was especially likely during rain when no customers would return carts or bring carts on their way in.

Even in places with high employment and minimum wage?

Yes. Essentially every traditional Walmart and Target store in the US does it that way, regardless of high employment and minimum wage.

Walmart as one example has a motorized cart mover. The employee collects and stacks the carts into a line, backed by the motorized unit, and then can just gently guide the whole flock of carts and it moves along with little human effort. It enables the employee to move dozens of carts at a time across the parking lot without very much physical risk of injury.