More than 2 million carts walk away every year. Our founding team tracked carts across an entire city to find out who takes them, and why.
It's easy to look at carts under an overpass and call that the whole problem. The data says otherwise. In 2019–2020, our founding team ran one of the first citywide cart-tracking studies for a grocer losing its entire fleet, 100 to 120 carts — every single year. The carts almost always left in the hands of ordinary shoppers. Here's where they actually went during that study period.
Convenience Trips: In urban areas where large portions of shoppers don't own a car, carts get "borrowed" to haul purchases home. In the citywide study, carts routinely traveled to adjacent stores, crossed streets, and covered close to a mile on extended shopping trips — then got abandoned, where scrappers or anyone else picked them up. Curbside pickup and delivery lockers blunt this, but they don't end it.
Resale and scrap: In many municipalities it is actually legal for scrap companies to collect "damaged" carts, and a bent frame or wobbly wheel counts, which describes half of any fleet. Organized groups also collect carts to sell or to fill containers headed overseas. Cellular tracking has followed assets right out of the country, down to the vessel.
Mischief: Schools and campus housing are reliable cart magnets. In rural areas, carts get reborn as grills. Nobody said the reasons had to be sophisticated.
Construction crews: One large retailer's theft audit found outside contractors casually walking carts to job sites to haul tools, and never returning them. Some crews accumulated small fleets that then traveled to the next site.
Knowing your store's actual loss pattern is the first step — and it's exactly what QuickTrack was built to show you. For the full picture of where carts end up, read Where Do Stolen Carts Go? or grab the Cart Retrieval Guide.