By David Ponce
You’ve seen it a million times… the old bum cart. It’s a shopping cart swiped from any mall parking lot by an enterprising street person bent of carrying his life around on anything other than his back.
Well, company Gate Keeper Systems seems to think that outfitting an entire parking lot with underground radio antennas that connect to specially outfitted cart wheels is a cost effective way to deal with this problem. The wheels simply lock up as soon as they’re out of range from the antennas.
If you visit their site, right here, all sorts of figures are thrown at you, some of which may convince you that all this is a good idea after all. I, for one, don’t really know, or for that matter, actually care.
Story VIA Strange New Products.
They put this system at the Ghetto-Kroger near my house and removed it within a few months… the problem is that when the wheel locks up, the crack-head continues to push the cart and it grinds that one wheel down to a less-than-round shape. So EVERY cart in the store bangs like holy hell.
A Shoppers Food Warehouse has had this for at least a year by me. But they’re connected to a bunch of other stores like Old Navy and Best Buy so apparently this keeps people from using their carts to just shop all day. But most people never notice any of the 150 signs warning you about it and are just confused as hell when the wheels lock next to Barnes & Noble.
Yeah, this is not terribly new. At the supermarket by me, the problem is that the border cuts across a shared parking lot at a weird angle, so it’s easy for shoppers not intending to make off with the cart to inadvertently cross the line and seize up the wheels. Annoying.
They have this in Las Vegas. I work for one of the car companies and we found that one of our models stalled when going over the underground wire! Thankfully is was part of a test fleet and didn’t make it to production that way 🙂