Trolley lock has thieves going around in circles

Supermarket trolleys at the Mt Eden Foodtown have been fitted with locking devices. Photo / Sarah Ivey

Attention students, drunks and late-night trolley jockeys - these new anti-theft trundlers will have you going around in circles.

After losing at least 250 shopping carts in six months, the Foodtown supermarket in Mt Eden has fitted its fleet with wheel clamps to stop thieves in their tracks.

The new system, to be introduced in all the supermarket chain's stores, locks one wheel when a mechanism detects the cart is outside the carpark boundaries.

A Foodtown spokeswoman said yesterday that a large number of shopping carts disappeared each year, and at $150 each they were not cheap to replace.

She did not want to say exactly how the system worked, so thieves would not know how to disable it.

"The mechanism is triggered once they go past a certain point."

She urged residents who saw abandoned trolleys to contact local supermarkets so they could be picked up.

Some shoppers whose cars were parked at the supermarket's boundary had their cages rattled when their four-wheelers suddenly stopped dead.

A trolley attendant said he had been told that in six months, more than 250 had been taken.

Shopper Stephen Nee said he always wondered what people did with supermarket trolleys they had dragged home.

"What do you do with them? Push the kids down the hill and let go? I'm a property maintenance guy and I see them all around the show. Parks, ditches ... everywhere."

Dave Bavage, a local resident, said he was sick of seeing the trolleys in his neighbourhood. "It's just lazy. You get free plastic bags don't you? Use those."

He said he had even seen the carts in trees.

Other shoppers thought the new security was a bit heavy-handed. "We were all students once weren't we?" one woman asked.