Supermarket goes high-tech to thwart trolley thieves

By WAYNE THOMPSON

An Auckland supermarket is turning to electronic technology to stop customers wheeling its shopping trolleys away.

The store is preparing a trial of an electro-magnetic system that locks the trolley wheels at the carpark boundary.

The store will be one from the Foodstuffs umbrella, which runs Pak'N Save and New World supermarkets, but the company will not say which supermarket it will be.

Retail operations general manager Graham Fabian said the system cost more than the $220 pricetag of a new trolley.

But he said it might recoup its cost eventually, given that some stores lost 100 trolleys a year and given also the cost of having contractors or staff scouting around neighbourhoods, creeks and gullies to recover trolleys.

The trial of the wheel-locking system, which is used in Britain, is being watched with interest by operators of major chainstores.

They prefer it to another overseas system where shoppers pay a $2 deposit to use a trolley and get a refund when they return it to the store.

It's one of the measures that will be considered next month by the Waitakere City Council when it looks at cutting the $10,000 a year it spends on hauling 50 to 60 trolleys from clogged waterways at Henderson.

But Henderson Community Board member Barry Shaw wants the dumping to stop, saying the council must stop "pussyfooting" around the problem and force stores to prevent theft.

He said the deposit system was a simple and effective solution.

The council should give firms a deadline to conform, or face a punitive penalty for every abandoned trolley retrieved by the council.

Staff of the big stores say they would lose customers if they were the first to introduce a deposit.

"We would cop a lot of flak - it's not the Kiwi way," said Henderson Pak'N Save manager Jamie Eden, who sends out staff with a grappling hook and rope to retrieve trolleys from creeks.

Woolworths spokesman Des Flynn said stores in the US and Australia had an automated system where a coin unlocked the trolley from the storage bay.

A trial of a similar system at an Auckland store some years ago was abandoned because of "customer backlash".