My local Safeway supermarket has changed the trolleys it offers customers several times over the past 3-4 years. Not only has the size of the trolleys changed (they’re now much larger than they used to be) but they’ve also oscillated on the decision as to whether trolleys have a coin return system or not.

However, when they’ve made these changes it has not been a universal change each time. Instead, the SPOTDs at Safeway have made only some of the trolleys new whilst keeping some of the old ones as well. This means the trolley area inside the store (and subsequently the carpark) tends to be littered with trolleys all over the place because people can’t return them to the trolley-return bays they’ve installed in the carpark. Small ones fit inside large ones but the reverse is not true so as soon as someone puts a small trolley into the trolley-return bay nobody else can return a large trolley. Additionally, when the slacker trolley-fetching staff go into the carpark to get the trolleys they leave the small ones in the trolley-return bays because they need to build a “caterpillar” convoy of trolleys to take back to the store and the small ones are incompatible with the large ones. The next customer then tries to put their trolley in the near-empty trolley bay but can’t because there’s a small trolley in it courtesy of the Safeway staff.

Obviously some SPOTD in Safeway noticed that their trolley bays often had one or two trolleys in them with other trolleys scattered around the carpark (usually on the islands of garden between parking bays) and decided it was the customer not bothering to return their trolley that was the problem. Ergo, we now have a system where you need to insert a coin into the trolley to release it from the group and that coin is refunded when you return it to the group of trolleys in the store or in the carpark. They’ve trialled this system before and it failed because about one-third of the trolleys required no coin deposit and therefore didn’t have the coin-ejection mechanism needed for the next trolley to be added to the group.

I found an empty trolley bay after doing my grocery shopping yesterday and pushed the trolley into it. As I picked up the coin-ejection mechanism built into the trolley-return bay (there needs to be one there for the first trolley since there are no other trolleys present to eject the coin) I realised that the SPOTDs had escalated the frustration. Since they’re now using larger trolleys, the chain on the coin ejection mechanism is too short by the barest of margins. The only way to return the trolley (if you’re the first one) is to turn the trolley around backward and get the coin out. The problem with that is that then it renders the rest of the trolley-return bay useless because the first one is facing the wrong way so the second one cannot get its coin ejected upon return.

And that, my dear friends at Safeway who are hopefully reading this, is why you probably found a trolley in the parking return bay that had the chain on the coin-ejection mechanism threaded several times through the wire mesh of the trolley and looped around the handle thrice before locking into place. I intend to become more creative over time if possible until the chain is lengthened…

Categories: SPOTD