Locking wheel systems have been around for 25 years. Carts keep leaving anyway. Here's exactly how — from people who have tracked thousands of them. FMI reported 2 million carts stolen annually in the US back in 2006. Nobody has run the study since, and most retailers we talk to believe today's number is higher — often at stores that already paid for a locking system. That's not a coincidence. Here's how carts beat the lock, ranked by how often we see it in tracking data.
Tracking flips the problem. Instead of betting everything on a perimeter that can be lifted over, driven past, or pushed through, you know where every cart is — on the lot or 50 miles from it — and retrieval becomes a routed run instead of a neighborhood search. See the full comparison at STG vs locking wheels, or dig into how QuickTrack handles the carts that were never going to stay put.