Crackdown on errant carts

Local cities are cracking down on runaway shopping carts that end up abandoned far from their stores, the P-I's John Iwasaki reports.

Turns out it's a bigger problem than you might have imagined:

The city estimates that 800 to 1,000 carts per year are pushed home full of groceries and merchandise, then abandoned, sometimes miles away at bus stops, outside apartments, on sidewalks and in ditches. Some end up in new roles, bearing the possessions of the homeless.

Shopping cart theft is a misdemeanor in Washington. But it's illegal only if the cart has a sign that identifies the retailer, warns that removal of the cart from the premises is unlawful and lists contact information to return the cart, among other provisions.

"At an average cost of $250, that's a quarter of a million dollars of shopping carts," said Ron Harris-White, special projects manager for Seattle Public Utilities, the agency responsible for removing hazards from city streets. Harris-White heads up the city's Shopping Cart Reclamation Action Project, or SCRAP. ("Shopping" was added to the original name to avoid an unpleasant acronym.)

And Seattle's figures might be low, if other cities' estimates are any gauge. Renton picked up more than 300 carts in a seven-week period last summer. A single apartment complex in Bellevue once held about 150 carts.