Stolen, abandoned shopping carts a ‘blight’ in Lakewood. City to begin fining stores
Lakewood and shop owners in the city are exasperated by stolen shopping carts being dumped on streets, sidewalks, at bus stops and in neighborhoods.
The city’s answer: Fine supermarkets and retailers if their shopping carts are found off store property.
“We are all trying to keep their property on their property,” Lakewood spokesperson Brynn Grimley told The News Tribune.
Some see the law as an effort to stop their property from being stolen.
Others oppose the new regulation.
Joe Gilliam with The Northwest Grocery Association, agrees the issue of stolen and abandoned carts is a frustrating challenge but warns that heavy-handed fines will be ineffective and force local retailers to raise prices.
“(The association) will be reaching out to the city for clarifications and modifications to make this a workable ordinance that helps clean up the city without raising grocery prices as a result,” Gilliam said in an email.
The city is open to adjustments as the law is implemented and providing a grace period. The legislation takes effect Jan. 16.
Brian Park owns Pal-Do World Market on South Tacoma Way. He said he is glad the city sees it as an issue — Park’s store has had consistent shopping cart thefts — but doesn’t feel the law is fair.
“You cannot carry someone else’s property off of their property,” he said. “It’s not fair that if the user takes property, I get fined for it.”
A Pal-Do security guard, John Nauer, gets his steps in by returning every cart in the parking lot inside the store as soon as it stops being used by a customer. Nauer drives around the city on his day off to pick up discarded carts near dumpsters and bus stops. He said he found five Pal-Do shopping carts last week about 10 minutes away from the store.
Addressing cart theft first appeared before the City Council in 2016, but the issue lay dormant until the city app, Lakewood311, provided residents a way to report. There have been 265 shopping cart-related complaints filed through the app since 2016, according to city records.
Lakewood’s senior policy analyst, Shannon Kelley-Fong, said there has been a 40 percent complaint increase in 2019.
The City Council has classified abandoned or lost shopping carts as a nuisance.
All retail stores with carts now must have signs attached to the carts that identify which store they belong to, provide a phone number or address and notify the public that removing the cart from the store’s property is illegal.
The law waives fees for the first eight carts collected by the city, but then the store is fined $100 per cart, surging to $200 by the 12th cart found outside of the store’s property. The tally is reset every month, Grimley said.
Shopping carts without the proper signage will not have any waived fees, with a $100 fine on the first offense. Most shopping carts have some form of branding on them, letting the city know which business to fine, Grimley said.
The ordinance also requires stores to use some type of proactive security measure, like:
▪ Self-locking wheels beyond a certain distance from the store’s property.
▪ Poles mounted to the carts, keeping them in the store
▪ Dedicated security
▪ Chained shopping carts that require a coin to unlock
“If we collected their cart and they don’t have a prevention method, we would fine them $100 per cart,” Grimley said.
Lakewood contends renegade shopping carts make the city look “blighted,” obstruct sidewalks, streets and emergency services, and reduce property values.
Council member Paul Bocchi said the council is highly sensitive to blight.
With regard to fining people who steal carts, Bocchi said, “It just doesn’t make sense.”
Fining the perpetrators, who tend to be experiencing homelessness, would mean police would have to arrest them after a certain number of offenses and drive them to a nearby jail, where the city would pay for their booking.
“It becomes the story of the $10,000 shopping cart,” Bocchi said.
Lakewood’s law mirrors that of Renton, where a shopping cart fine has been in place for more than four years. Renton’s spokesperson, Preeti Shridhar, said the city’s first year of enforcement, 2017, the number of collected stray carts was 841. By 2019, that number had dropped to 462.
