Store Technology Group

Hawaii HB1636 proposes a $500 municipal "buy-back" fee on shopping carts found off retailer property. The structure of the bill is simple: a participating jurisdiction collects abandoned carts, charges the retailer $500 each to retrieve them, and pockets the difference between the cost to round them up and the recovery fee.

For context, Phoenix charges retailers up to $50 per cart for the same service. Hawaii's number isn't a typo. It's an order of magnitude higher than any existing cart-ordinance fee we've seen.

If the bill passes, the math gets ugly fast. A single high-loss store that buys 150 replacement carts a year is already absorbing $30K in cart costs. Add a $500-per-cart municipal fee on top of carts that were never recovered, and a chain operator in Hawaii is looking at six-figure annual fine exposure from a single jurisdiction.

The thing locking wheels can't do is produce a recovery record. The ordinances now being written aren't asking retailers to prove they tried to prevent theft. They're asking them to prove they retrieved the cart within a defined window. A locking-wheel deployment generates no data the city can audit. A tracked fleet does.

San José Municipal Code 9.60 requires any retailer with 26 or more shopping carts to maintain a formal Abandoned Shopping Cart Prevention Plan on file with the city. That's a much lower threshold than most operators assume. A neighborhood grocer, a hardware store, a regional pharmacy chain — all of them are in scope.

The plan has to include: how carts are identified (signage, branding, ID), what prevention measures are in place, how the retailer responds to a complaint within the city's retrieval window (typically 72 hours), and a contact for enforcement. Miss the window and the per-cart fee structure kicks in.

Here's the operational catch: a locking-wheel deployment alone doesn't satisfy a Prevention Plan that requires demonstrable retrieval. The plan needs documentation. Where was the cart? When was it reported? When was it retrieved? Who retrieved it? Locking wheels produce none of that.

San José is one of 58+ California municipalities with cart ordinances on the books. Bellevue, Phoenix, and a handful of others outside California are in the same trajectory. The trend isn't slowing — Tennessee passed a bill in the opposite direction restricting municipal fines, which is worth tracking, but the dominant national pattern is more enforcement, not less.

Phoenix has been running an active cart enforcement program for years. Retailers that ignore the city's complaint windows get billed at up to $50 per cart. The city's data on which retailers generate the most complaints is public, and it tells a story that the locking-wheel industry would rather not discuss.

The retailers running locking wheels at 66% or more of their store footprint in Phoenix were still the largest contributors to the city's abandoned-cart complaint volume. Not the smallest. Not somewhere in the middle. The largest.

That's not a one-store anomaly. It's a pattern. The locking-wheel playbook was built on a 1990s assumption: if you stop the cart at the property line, you stop the theft. Two decades of contact with the real world have invalidated that assumption.

The deeper issue is what locking wheels can't do. They're a prevention play. They have no answer for the cart that's already 2.5 miles away — which, per our own tracking data, is where the average stolen cart ends up. The ordinances now being written reward retrieval, not prevention. Locking wheels are aligned with the wrong half of the problem.

The new playbook is the inverse: track every cart, automate the retrieval workflow, document the recovery for compliance. That's how you reduce complaints. That's how you satisfy a city auditor. That's how the spend you're already making on retrieval starts producing results.

We pulled location data from a sample of QuickTrack-tagged carts across multiple retailers to answer a question that the industry has been content to leave fuzzy: when a cart leaves the property and doesn't come back, where does it actually go?

The average distance from the origin store: 2.5 miles. The maximum we observed: 7.5 miles. Carts are not gradually drifting into the parking lot. They're being moved — in pickup trucks, by determined shoppers, or by people repurposing them for storage and transport — and they're staying gone.

Where do they end up? Apartment complexes. Self-storage facilities. Behind houses. In planters. Once a cart is 2.5 miles away, the retailer doesn't even know it exists unless someone reports it. Which means it doesn't get retrieved, it gets replaced — at $200–$300 a cart, plus shipping.

This is also where the "real GPS, real cellular" distinction matters. AirTag-style trackers piggyback on bystander Bluetooth signals — useful for finding car keys, useless for an LP team trying to recover assets at scale. QuickTrack runs on cellular and GPS with Wi-Fi triangulation, sends breadcrumb trails, and works inside apartment complexes and self-storage facilities where Bluetooth coverage falls apart.

The takeaway isn't that locking wheels are useless — they reduce some shrink, in some scenarios, for some store formats. The takeaway is that the actual problem the industry has been describing for 20 years (carts disappear and we can't find them) was always a retrieval problem, not a prevention problem. The data was just never visible until cellular tracking made it visible.