Locking shopping carts have been a thorn in customers’ sides this year as grocery stores ramp up anti-theft measures. For Ontario mother Rebecca, an anti-theft cart locked so abruptly, it “whiplashed” her baby and caused her to slam her abdomen against the cart handle.
Rebecca, who did not want to share her last name, recounted her “jarring” experience in a post on the popular Reddit thread, “Loblaws Is Out Of Control.” Almost 100 commenters have chimed in so far, retelling their own sagas of locking carts and “shrugging” employees looking on.
Rebecca has been taking part in the ongoing Loblaws boycott started on Reddit but had to visit this Real Canadian Superstore in Ajax, Ont., to buy the President’s Choice brand of dog food, the only variety that doesn’t cause her senior dog serious skin and digestive issues.
But she’s hoping her experience will be a teaching moment for the store and the company, Loblaw, which owns and operates hundreds of stores across Canada under Loblaws, No Frills, Zehrs, Provigo, Real Canadian Superstore and Maxi banners, among others. Rebecca wants the company to prevent similar incidents from happening again.
On Nov. 5, Rebecca visited the store and brought along her 15-month old son. Since the bag of dog food weighed 14 pounds, the only way she could carry it out was by using a cart. She placed her son in the cart’s child seat.
Rebecca used self-checkout to pay for the dog food. She took her receipt and made her way to the exit. But as she was passing through the doors, “my cart came to a sudden, complete stop,” she wrote on Reddit.
“I’m blocking the doorway and the alarms are going off and my baby got shaken,” Rebecca told Yahoo Canada in a telephone interview.
“I thought I got stuck on something, I was checking the wheels … You see people take their carts to their car so in my mind it was so completely unexpected.”
Another woman offered to help Rebecca by giving her another working cart told her the same thing had happened to her once.
“It was jarring to me, it was jarring to [my baby],” she says. “We were fine, to the best of my knowledge, but other people might not have been.”
Rebecca managed to get the dog food to her car but was upset as to what happened. She went back in the store with her baby to talk to someone about what had happened.
After some time, an assistant manager came and apologized, telling Rebecca “that happens sometimes,” and that it’s a security issue.
“I asked if they’d write it up, or what they’d do about it,” she says. “It wasn’t an acceptable answer. If I was elderly or fell over because I stopped, it’s very risky.”
The assistant manager then told her he could write up the incident for her and grabbed a paper towel to get down the information, which he told her he’d enter into the system later. He also provided her with his contact information and title on another piece of paper towel.
The cart was still blocking the exit after she’d talked to the assistant manager, with a lineup of people trying to get around. Two men tried to get the locked cart out of the way, to no success.
“Security wasn’t interested,” she says. “The alarms are happening but if you’re not going to check into it, what’s the point?”
The whole experience has left her baffled.
“They’re treating you like a criminal as you’re leaving the store,” Rebecca says. “If they’d locked my cart before I’d paid, I think I would have abandoned it.”
She says stores like Winners have signs up to indicate that carts will only work inside the store. She hopes Loblaw and their stores will adopt similar messaging.
“I feel like they invested money into carts that lock for security measures but it’s not really security measures, it’s just inconvenient and a potential safety risk,” she says. “Why do we have to worry about the carts doing something that can potentially hurt us.”
Rebecca didn’t reach out to the assistant manager, but did receive a call from a claims adjuster to get more information and confirm she wasn’t suffering from long-term injuries.
“At the time it was two days later…at that point there were no issues, so from her point of view, she probably checked everything off that we weren’t going to sue,” she says.
In June, after a similar incident at a Zehrs was shared on the Reddit group “Loblaws Is Out Of Control,” Dave Bauer, director of media relations with Loblaw, told Yahoo Canada that organized retail crime has a massive effect on its stores, which in turn has affected prices.
“Over the past few years, we’ve introduced a number of different technologies to help mitigate this risk, including smart-wheel technology in carts,” he says. “This has made a huge difference and has stopped thieves from pushing full carts of groceries out the doors. Very rarely, we’ve had incidents where the wheels accidentally lock. We understand how unpleasant this can be for customers, and we’re continuing to do what we can to fix this.”
Loblaw has not responded to a request for comment on this most recent incident.
As for whether she’ll be shopping at that Real Canadian Superstore again for her dog food, Rebecca says she isn’t sure.
“Maybe I’ll just send my husband in,” she says. “We’ll figure something out.”
