Vernon city council discussed the idea of fining businesses that don’t use theft protection devices on their shopping carts on Monday.
Council ultimately voted not to pursue the policy after a city staff report recommended against it.
A survey of stores using carts found that some managers were upset about the prospect of being fined when the stores themselves had been victimized by theft.
“I am a tax paying business that is being stolen from and you want to fine the victim instead of the people who are committing the crime? I have a service that goes around town once a week to collect my carts, a service that I have to pay for,” one store manager said in the report.
That concern that resonated with Coun. Kari Gares, who noted that the theft of carts was already costing businesses thousands of dollars per year.
“To go back to charging those very businesses for their shopping carts is crazy,” Gares said.
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“I support not charging these businesses.”
The idea to require businesses to use theft protection on shopping carts was recommended by the city’s Activate Safety Task Force.
Councillor Brian Quiring admitted he had suggested the idea but now believed it was the wrong approach.
“Clearly it was the wrong idea on my part but we came to the right solution, now we are not going to fine them,” Quiring said.
The staff report also shed light on how shopping carts are ending up on Vernon streets.
Some stores reported very few thefts but others had seen large numbers of shopping carts stolen.
Mass thefts happen when thieves cut the chains or locks being used to secure carts, according to the staff report.
People with the downtown Safeway location told city staff that between 10 and 13 of their shopping carts go missing each week.
Superstore also experienced significant shopping cart theft despite cart users being required to pay a cash deposit to unlock them.
“Superstore reports that thieves have devised a method to over-ride the pay per use locking mechanism and that more than 100 carts valued at $30,000 were lost in 2018,” Geoffrey Gaucher, the city’s manager of protective services, wrote in his report to council.
Gaucher noted that Superstore is looking to put an “electronic wheel locking system” on its carts next year in an effort to “stop the losses.”
The city’s bylaw department believes there are only roughly 12 to 15 carts being used by the city’s street population, the report added.
The staff report went on to say that around 40 per cent of the carts retrieved by a private company — which is contracted by businesses to gather abandoned carts and return them — are actually recovered “from apartments, condos and seniors’ complexes.”
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