I always kinda doubted that part, or at least its effectiveness. Iirc a 50 eurocent coin will unlock most trolleys, which is pretty cheap for a whole ass trolley.
And sure enough, there's a lot of elderly people that just have a shopping trolley in their yard or something. This morning I found one randomly in our bike shed.
I’d never seen that in the uk - but maybe that town was the sweet spot in size where it was small enough that you could actually get home with a trolley (and it was nice and flat), and maybe the number of visitors passing through meant rules got broken more - those the trolleys were more in the suburban areas than just where the hostels were.
It's not an incentive to "not steal the trolley", it's an incentive to put it back in its place for people who were already not planning on stealing one.
This way the store and the customers don't have to deal with trolleys strewn around everywhere and blocking parking spaces, among other advantages.
I think when they removed the coins during Covid they just noticed that most people were already well-behaved enough to return the carts to their places, so the incentive is just not needed anymore. Actually in Belgium, Colruyt had never had coins for their carts and it just works.
There's no particular need to change this, because one person can only use so many shopping carts. If you maintain the price at "free", demand saturates and people stop stealing carts.
It's common for people to return carts to a designated area, and it's also not rare for people to just leave the carts somewhere convenient for them. Store employees periodically go around and move the carts back to the place where you expect to pick them up.
Costco is an interesting hybrid case. They make it easy to return the carts "correctly" by providing little depots scattered throughout their enormous parking lot. Realistically, the parking lot is so large that very few people would be willing to return a cart to the front of the store, where you get the cart from if you're going shopping.
However, people also aren't going to pick up carts from those depots deep within the parking lot and wheel them over to the store. So Costco employees still have to make rounds of the parking lot and move carts that have been left there to their correct location at the front of the store. But for Costco, you're supposed to leave the cart in the parking lot, but only in certain locations.
> If you maintain the price at "free", demand saturates and people stop stealing carts.
If the price is $1, the same people who'll steal them will keep stealing them (with a screwdriver it's easy to pry your coin back out of the slot anyway).
> it's also not rare for people to just leave the carts somewhere convenient for them
With the coin, guess what... it will be rarer, because the people have incentive to get their coin back. At least in theory. And if someone doesn't care about their change, some enterprising kids might return the carts anyway to gain some money, and the end result for the supermarket is the same: carts at their designated return locations. The worker just has to go to 3 or 4 of these locations instead of running up and down the parking lot collecting all the stray carts.
It’s compounded because they’re also the only store near me that doesn’t have handbaskets, so you need to either grab a cart or hope there’s a loose cardboard box in the store (which there often is because they expect customers to use them, but you may not find it quickly).
It’s also an incentive for anyone else.
If I put the coin in and then leave the cart in the lot anyways, someone who wanders by is also incentivized to grab it and put it back, as they would get a free coin.
The system is actually somewhat elegant, if you return the cart you pay nothing and if you don’t you pay a small fine to whoever does.
The coins are so that people put them back in their designated storage area, not to prevent theft. A significant fraction of the population are lazy asshole who tend to leave carts next to where their car was parked instead of walking the 10-20 meters it take to return them.
Most 2-3y old kids can walk and when my babies where too small to walk I would just put my groceries in the bottom part of the stroller and in an hiking backpack instead of a cart.
I get that you don't want to make accommodations for people but you might want to think about what leads you all to get so bent out of shape on this one. At the end of the day your argument boils down to "your spouse just needs to work harder so I'm not inconvenienced by the cart she hung off the curb next to the space I wanted." Society is full of people with differing abilities in differing mental spaces and not everyone owns equipment like that and is willing to spend 10 minutes getting it out and setting it up in a busy parking lot while also wrangling their willful, very curious child.
There are absolutely lazy people, but it's not always the case.
People having newborns typically use baby carriers and strollers and when using the later use the storage space of the stroller to carry a significant amount of groceries. Nobody with a sane mind woud grab 2 newborns in the same arm and throw them in an unsafe shopping cart.
Every single person that doesn't return their cart does so out of laziness. Besides just being an asshole, the cart will take a potential parking spot that someone else later needs to move to free up, and worst of all the wind could blow the cart into someone elses car.
Nobody is gonna kidnap her kids as she walks the cart back in less than a minute. It is simply her being a lazy asshole.
I can see that this is a very personal issue for you, so I'll just say this: People are complicated, and I would encourage you to have more grace for them. If it bothers you that much to see a cart left by a mom struggling with kids, you might consider offering to return it on her behalf.
Why would I buy something I really don't want to lose to replace something I kinda don't want to lose?
It usually takes more time to go inside the store, find an employee who is available to get that plastic chip, go back outside to pick your cart and back to the store than it is to just return the cart so you can get your coin/chip back.
The point is not to stop theft, it is just to incentivize people to put back the cart where it belongs instead of leaving it in the middle of the parking lot.
Anyways, personally, I 3D printed a fake chip that can be removed without reattaching the cart and have it on my keychain. I find it more convenient, and hacking the system is fun. I return the cart anyways.
[0] https://www.amazon.de/Caianwin-Shopping-Trolley-Stainless-Re...
My favorite part of the system in larger stores is that to handle people not carrying cash (Sweden is pretty long-gone in this regard), you can usually go inside the store to get a free plastic token that fits the reader.
That always made me chuckle, since the entire point of the system is that you're supposed to be incentivized to return the cart to get your money back, so by replacing your money with a free plastic token that they hand out from a basket, they did .. something to the overall system design.
Still fun as an example of how the customer's overall experience is more important than the point of an entire security system, I think.