Shota Mkheidze drives a big white pickup truck that he got from U-Haul, capable of carrying about 12 shopping carts at a time.
“You have to be careful with this truck,” Mkheidze said on a recent Friday. As he drove out of a parking garage in Kakaako, the truck’s antennae knocked against the ceiling every few seconds.
Soon enough the truck would be snaking through Kapolei neighborhoods to hunt stray shopping carts. Walmart Kapolei had contracted Mkheidze to retrieve its carts left on the streets, a task his company has completed every week or two for the past few years.
It was difficult to know where to look at first.
“Where do you find shopping carts? Before, we had to drive like five hours,” he said. By now, they’ve optimized a route that takes half the time.
Stray shopping carts may seem like a haphazard issue. But the systems that go into keeping them secure are complex.
Some stores employ magnetic wheel-locking mechanisms on their carts that activate once they pass a certain line, like an electric fence but for shopping carts.
Others — such as Walmart Kapolei, Walmart Honolulu, Target Ala Moana, Down To Earth and Whole Foods — have contracted Mkheidze’s retrieval service, he said. Walmart, Target and Whole Foods did not respond to requests for comment.
As the number of shopping carts has multiplied on city streets around the country — many of which are used by homeless people to transport their goods — retailers and local governments have been trying to reverse the trend.
Mkheidze retrieved just over 10 shopping carts that Friday afternoon.
The first few were easy to find. Shopping cart number one was right across Kapolei Parkway from the Walmart and was left unattended and empty.
Still, Mkheidze put on a mask and gloves. He likes to wear them because shopping carts can be grimier than people expect. Using the attached lift, he loaded the cart into the truck bed and then secured it with a cargo net.
Shopping carts two, three and four were further up Kealanani Avenue, in the Villages of Aʻeloa.
Suburban residential streets may seem like a strange place to search for shopping carts. In urban areas, they can often be found around homeless encampments, where they act as easy storage and transport for an assortment of goods.
Not so in Kapolei. Many shopping carts there sit empty along the sidewalk, abandoned by shoppers who use them to lug items home.
“They get encouraged to keep doing it, because they know somebody’s going to pick it up for free,” Mkheidze said.
After those pickups, he navigated through tight suburban Makahou Street, going down cul-de-sacs in search of carts. No dice.
Mkheidze doesn’t weave through every residential neighborhood. Through trial and error, his company has narrowed down which areas tend to have shopping carts. He wanted to check out Makahou Street because a resident had left a shopping cart outside their home more than once, which led to another neighbor calling Walmart to complain, he said.
“It helps you to avoid wasting time,” he said.
Mkheidze grew up in Soviet-era Georgia, a country wedged between Europe and Asia, and was a teenager when the Berlin Wall fell. He wanted to be an entrepreneur after watching a TV program about life in the United States called “America With Mikhail Taratuta.”
When he was about 12 years old, he presented a business plan to his mother inspired by the show. She was supportive but practical.
“Everything is perfect,” he remembers her saying. “You have only one flaw — you live in USSR.”
He moved to the U.S. when he was 20, and lived on the East Coast for a few years before being offered a scholarship for Hawaii Pacific University’s master of business administration program.
After graduating, he founded his company, Honeybee Dynamics, as a cleaning service for restaurants like Chili’s and Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, using YouTube to teach himself how to use the equipment. Soon enough he expanded to cleaning and repairing shopping carts for Walmart. Around 2021, he started retrieving carts, too.
Now, Mkheidze knows shopping carts inside and out. He knows how to repair their wheels. He knows where they congregate. He speculates about their future.
“I wonder how long before they’ll come up with the smart shopping carts — like, it follows you to the car … And then when you’re done, you click the button and it goes back to the original location. Parks itself,” he said at one point.
He also thinks about their value.
New carts aren’t cheap. Letting them trickle out onto the streets is bad business, and not just because of replacement costs — visually, it looks bad for Walmart if a bunch of Walmart-branded shopping carts sit abandoned on the streets, Mkheidze said.
“Out of all the stores, I think Walmart’s been a kind of community leader in cleaning up behind themselves … even if it’s destroyed, if it’s without wheels,” Mkheidze said.
Walmart did not respond to requests for comment.
Other companies’ shopping carts also litter the area, but Mkheidze explained that he was only looking for Walmart’s.
“It’s Longs Drugs, and we don’t do Longs Drugs,” he said while driving past one.
He pulled into a nearby parking lot, where shopping carts five, six and seven sat with some trash in them.
Mkheidze packs trash bags for this reason. With his gloves on, he reached into the mostly-full shopping cart number seven and grabbed one handful out at a time. Then he left the trash bag there, next to another, non-Walmart shopping cart.
“If somebody had some personal item, it’s right there,” he said.
Shopping carts do sometimes have personal items. Near the Burger King on Farrington Highway, shopping carts eight and nine had sweaters in them, one of which was woven in and out of the cart’s structure.
Nobody was around except for a small empty homeless encampment. That made it easier for Mkheidze, who said that it can be awkward when he approaches a homeless person to retrieve their shopping cart full of stuff.
Mkheidze put the items into a trash bag and tucked it by the encampment, then loaded the carts onto his truck.
On the other side of the Burger King, a homeless man was using shopping cart number 10. He kept a black luggage bag and pieces of cardboard in it.
Mkheidze walked up undaunted.
“Hello, I’m with Walmart. To pick up the Walmart shopping cart,” he said. The man nodded in affirmation, helped remove the items from the cart, and then thanked Mkheidze.
“Most cases are like that,” Mkheidze said — about 80%, according to his estimate. The other 20% of the time, he calls the police.
Mkheidze wants to expand his operations. Twice during the drive he passed out his business card, including to a police officer who pulled up to ask about his service while Mkheidze retrieved shopping cart number 11.
He said that people tend to be receptive in the moment, but formal negotiations sometimes break down as it’s passed up the chain of command.
Down to Earth’s Kakaako location worked with Mkheidze in the fall of 2023, but only received four shopping carts from him, marketing manager Sisi Toro said. She said that location loses about 100 shopping carts a year, costing about $35,000. Ditto for the King Street location.
Mkheidze charges at least $150 per retrieval trip, but declined to specify more of his contract details.
Down to Earth installed a magnetic locking mechanism at its Kahului location in 2022, but that required digging around the perimeter to install the mechanism. Oahu locations will likely not receive the same upgrade, Toro said.
Currently, the store’s delivery driver will pick up carts informally if he sees them, she said. She added that a truck from another establishment sometimes drops off shopping carts to the Kakaako location in the middle of the night, but that nobody knows where the truck comes from.
She said that money more than branding motivates Down to Earth’s shopping cart retrieval efforts.
“Obviously, we like to preserve our brand identity. But really, it has just been the monetary aspect. Because it is really expensive to buy new carts, so that’s really all it is for us,” Toro said.
Target, Walmart and Whole Foods did not respond to requests for comment.
Mkheidze envisions a partnership with the city where he could be given space to store shopping carts left out on the streets. Then, he could call stores and offer to return their respective shopping carts for a fee.
The City and County of Honolulu currently performs shopping cart roundups about once per week using their Department of Facility Maintenance, spokesperson Ryan Wilson said in an email. He added that the team “would be very interested” in discussing Mkheidze’s service.
He said that DFM has been averaging 350 shopping cart pickups per month, the equivalent of 4,200 per year. That’s slightly down from the previous two years.
Phoenix, Arizona, has had a city-run shopping cart retrieval program since 2007.
It collected over 8,300 shopping carts during fiscal year 2022-2023, down from about 9,300 the year before but up from about 6,400 the year before that, according to data provided by spokesperson Teleia Galaviz.
“Every year it seems like they go up,” said Betsy Cable of the Neighborhood Services Department.
She said that some stores have their own contracted retrieval services, but that stray carts from those stores still mill about town. She doesn’t know why.
“If I knew that, I could retire,” she said.
Mkheidze spotted the last shopping cart of the day while driving one more lap around the area. It was near the corner of Makakilo Drive and Farrington Highway, behind Walmart as the crow flies.
It looked to be partially buried. But when Mkheidze lifted it, it turned out to just be half of a shopping cart: destroyed, without wheels. Its skeleton shifted when Mkheidze loaded it into the truck bed with the other 11 carts.
“We have 11-point-half,” he said.
As he dropped off the shopping carts at Walmart’s back warehouse section, Mkheidze filled out a physical work order form with the status of his delivery.
One cart was broken. Eleven carts – he wrote a few letters, then crossed them off to write something else: “Needs washing.”
“So now it’s really up to them,” he said.
His company offers power-washing and disinfection as additional services. Some stores use that service, and some opt to do their own in-house cleaning. But he didn’t want to get into specifics on how each store cleans their carts after he retrieves them.
“If customers knew how those shopping carts got retrieved and what they’re going through before they get delivered to the store, trust me, they wouldn’t even shop there,” he said.
