Trolleys and society

About 6 months ago I had a phone call with a friend who lives in Canada and we were talking about various elements of what's going on in the world. He mentioned a trend that's come up in his area in Ontario where the hand baskets found in supermarkets have been disappearing. It is so severe in places that some of the stores just don't have any baskets anymore. He asked me if this trend was happening in Australia, a question that caught my attention because its about such a mundane aspect of life but yet immediately felt it had some sort of deeper importance to it.

After this conversation I started noticing a few things here, firstly that the shopping baskets are well and truly in plentiful supply in the stores but shopping trolleys are being returned less often these days in Australia. In Canada I remember at some point noticing a new "technological" approach as an attempt to deal with societal decay which was to add these automatically activated breaking devices to the shopping trolley wheels. The way this technology worked was that at some point when you went too far from the store the wheels would lock up. Australia hasn't used this "innovation" yet, but I'm starting to wonder if it will be soon. To be clear the issue of not returning trolleys is anything but new, according to this 2003 article at the time 60000 trolleys were lost or damaged each year back then. Its clear trolleys have been leaving stores for a few decades but perhaps before there was more of an effort to recover these dumped trolleys? Lately it seems recovery is not happening as often anymore and trolleys seem more visible in the streets. Efforts to recover these trolleys can be expensive as we saw in 2018 in Port Augusta where hundreds of trolleys were dumped into the water at the wharf. There's obviously a question of who pays to clean these up and it's not obvious where responsibility lies. After all the problem is one caused by antisocial individuals and not so much by the retailers.

The above picture shows a trend in shopping trolleys, at one point in time trolleys with locks operated by a coin got popular. But then they started to disappear in many locations. I suspect this was because of the rise of cashless payments, perhaps customers just didn't have coins on them so the stores realized that the coin deposit was now becoming an impediment to having customers access the trolleys. Aldi at one point in time sold these dollar coin shaped tokens that people could put on their key rings which would then ensure they could access the trolleys. As far as I remember Aldi never removed the coin operated locking mechanism from their trolleys. If you think you'll make more in sales than you'll lose in trolley losses it makes some sense in a monetary assessment to remove the deposit and I suspect this is what happened.

When shopping trolleys are dumped they often are not reused. Most people don't know what a shopping trolley costs since this is just part of the retail experience that is taken for granted these days. But it wasn't always so, shopping trolleys are a relatively recent invention that is more relevant in a society that has a lot of cars. Why cars? If you are limited to what you can carry home then you'll only take what you can carry, but if you have a car you can take a lot more weight, a trolley allows you to move weight from the store to the car more effectively. The benefits to the store from providing trolleys mostly applies when you have a lot of car travel to the store (as there's likely not enough local customers who would wheel the trolley to their house and back to make this tipping point occur in many places). Also finding out what a shopping trolley costs isn't as trivial as finding out the price of the goods that will be put inside it. For the most part the manufacturers that make these shopping trolleys don't publish their prices and ask you to enquire before they give a quote. I found some suppliers that would sell shopping trolleys new for $500 AUD. A couple years back when people were hoarding toilet paper and piling as much of it as possible into trolleys I remember hearing $400 per trolley as a quote. Given we likely have had 25% inflation (at least) since then the $500 price point checks out. I've found some quotes on baskets and those common plastic ones cost about $10 each, the rolling variety ones are around $40. There was a warehousing business next to me in Collingwood that imported cheap crap from the 3rd world to resell locally. They just stole these shopping carts for their operations, I now see why they did this, it was thousands of dollars they didn't have to spend because they figured they could just steal them. My business just like theirs were kicked out from the area because of real estate speculation, they moved to some outer suburb then dumped the trolleys in the street because they never gave a fuck.

If these carts and baskets start disappearing from stores in large numbers its going to hurt those stores. How much people care about stores is an important factor for a society. The more I've seen of the world the more I get the impression you can tell a number of important things about a society by seeing how people interact with shops. Especially the shops in the local community. The last time I was in San Francisco in 2019 I remember seeing many items stored behind locked cabinets in retail stores. In some cases these weren't even high valued items, but were just items that people stole frequently. Seeing low quality coffee stored behind locked windows was a truly dystopian sight. At the time in 2019 I remember thinking about these trends with shoplifting and noticing that there were certain locations in the world where shoplifting just wasn't getting prosecuted. It seemed as though in those places the police had just given up on enforcing these laws. The next step almost inevitably was that stores would start to disappear from those locations only to be replaced by nothing. Businesses can only operate when there are sufficient incentives and societal structures in place to support them. When you remove these societal structures its not like these businesses provide goods cheaper, they just close down entirely.

What brought societal changes in shopping to my attention was going to a shopping mall that I had been to many times as a young child for the first time in over a decade. Many of the storefronts were closed in 2023 and since then the situation has deteriorated further. Commerce is unfortunately still retreating just like shopping trolleys despite what all the lying gaslighting media is trying to sell as a narrative to people¹. I noticed at this shopping center many people didn't return the trolleys to the stores. There were bays to return the trolleys to but a considerable number of people just left the trolleys in the carpark without taking the short trip to return them.

What I noticed was that the trolleys at the supermarket were all chained up and needed a $1 or $2 coin to operate. The issue was that I had no coins on me because frankly due to the extreme inflation here coins have almost no purchasing power anymore. If you wanted to have enough currency to purchase anything it would be extremely heavy to carry enough coins. This is an important milestone but it's more of a practical one that few people will think about. Unfortunately the psychological milestones of price are the ones that impact the average person. For example we have crossed the $5 coffee threshold in many parts of the city, a truly dismal milestone. This might seem like it doesn't really matter but I think psychologically speaking this is an important step in the ongoing death of the Australian dollar, especially when you consider that Australian's are obsessed with coffee. When you look at a note and know you used to be able to buy two coffees at lunch break with it but now you can only buy one the note loses psychological power. Currencies require psychological power to be useful so when this starts to fade its a large problem. The reason it is psychologically important is that the average person never looks at numbers that represent inflation in the abstract, ideas like looking at indexes that track inflation just goes over people's heads entirely. Academic arguments about what indexes best track inflation is a discussion that only happens in a small group of the population. The average person understands inflation by coming across day to day expenditures that cause them to notice that there's been a change in prices for the same things they used to purchase. The average person changes their behavior based on feelings about price not mathematical analysis. This is why shrinkflation has been such a successful scam, by reducing the value people receive for an item while keeping the price the same you give people fewer psychological cues to notice the decrease in value they are receiving for their money. One of the large changes that people notice is the difference in money they are handling. Unfortunately the pandemic of mindless cashless payments continues to spread like a highly contagious virus because cashless payments reduce the number of psychological cues people get to reflect on currency and money. This is of course encouraged by many with vested interests because research clearly shows that people are far worse with managing their money when paying with a card compared to when they have to physically handle some form of physical tactile currency.

When I was younger I clearly remember at the shopping mall they had a deposit on trolleys that you got returned when you returned the trolley to the store. In 1988 the first two dollar coin was released in Australia, in principle this was a truly debased coin, with the two dollar coin having less intrinsic value than the one dollar coin due to its smaller size. The psychology behind the one and two dollar coins in Australia was entirely debased as well, the coins look "gold" but contain less valuable metals than the smaller denomination coinage. Despite the clear signal that the currency was being destroyed right in front of peoples faces a two dollar coin actually could actually buy you things back in the 1990s. I'm not exactly sure when the trolley deposits started because as far as I understand there was a time when everyone just returned these things and a deposit wasn't needed. Unfortunately Australian society has been falling further and further away from this sort of high trust behavior over the decades. Adding a deposit was an indication of societal decay, since you were creating a financial incentive for people to do the right thing, but it wasn't the end of the story. That said people were still responding to the financial incentives because the currency had more value. At least for a while trolleys were getting returned again.

Around the same time I remember in the 1990s there were coin operated pool tables that took 20 cent coins. There was a coin collecting device that operated that would allow you to set how many 20 coins that the table would take to dispense the pool balls. Apparently the invention of a smaller cue ball to enable a coin operating device was an Australian invention. To the rest of the world I have to apologize for invention since unequal sized cue and object balls with pool is a perversion of the game. Now that we have technology that would allow the same sized cue ball we unfortunately have entered into a path dependency issue where people are doing something vastly substandard because "that's the way its always been". Its interesting to note how money can change sport, in this case it happened very directly and very much not for the better. Priced in terms of games of pool a trolley was 5-10 games worth. These days you can get $2 returned for a trolley but in some venues a single game of pool is $2, I've even seen as high as $5 a game. You get at most one game of pool for returning a trolley now.

These days coins are increasingly leaving circulation because the coins cost more to make than the face value, again due to rampant inflation. Countries like New Zealand entirely debased their coinage in 2006 in anticipation of this, whereas other countries are just minting less coins than there is demand for them. We are now approaching the point where the metal to make Australian coins is more valuable than the face value of the coins. Given Australian coinage has a lot of nickle in it, we are just one crisis away from the coins being far more valuable for their metal content than their face value.

The popularity of pool declined along with smoking bans in the early 2000s which was a time where inflation ran hot but was not reported on. Then again this should not be a surprise since inflation is always under-reported in ones own country until the point of extreme currency crisis arrives. People from the early 2000s before the smoking ban would be astonished by the price of cigarettes today. Unfortunately Australia was one of the countries that was first to start getting rid of physical currency in the economy. Pool tables somewhat avoided the awkward situation that was arising elsewhere with coin operated machines because the venues that hosted them could give people change. Banknote accepting machines for vending were far more expensive than these simple mechanical coin operated devices and as such simply weren't economically viable to add to many vending type machines. It was some time later that the widespread availability of both cheap computing power and widespread cellular data made it possible to accept credit card based payments for unattended vending machines. Many people probably paid little attention to this but it marked a massive shift in the way Australian society practically interacted with currency and stopped using money.

On a family trip to Queensland in the 1990s I remember you could get a dollar returned from a deposit by returning luggage trolleys back to the airport terminal. I know it was the late 1990s because there was no security theatre at the airports, you mostly just walked to the gate and got on the plane. At the time I was still too young to have the entrepreneurial spirit well and truly beaten out of me by the corrupt schooling system and I naturally saw this as an amazing opportunity to make some money. I remember running around in the carpark and collecting trolleys. I would have made like $20 or something, and $20 actually bought you things back then. A $20 note back then still felt like money. I remember carrying $200 in cash to go get a 20 megabyte hard drive for a computer back in the 1990s and 20 megabytes felt like a lot of hard drive space. Back then $200 felt like it bought you a lot. Now I could easily spend $200 on groceries for my family and not even make it through the week. But back then $200 would have overflowed a large trolley easily. There's a huge change in the feeling of the money now, a $20 note now does not have the same feeling of money, it is just some currency that represents nothing and therefore has a throwaway energy to it. The notes are not inspiring because what they represent is not inspiring. The dollars represent a promise but the energy of that original promise has mostly dissipated and died.

By the time I was getting flown up to Queensland for work in 2016 the deposit return for airport trolleys was gone. Maybe this just happens to everyone who travels a lot for work but the feeling of being at airports seems to have changed and not just because I was jaded by frequent business fights. People just seem to pay more money and not care, the collection of these trolleys now falls on some employee to do and you would see trolleys scattered all over the place.

Recently I had a company contact me about setting up a deposit return system for water bottles at amusement parks. It is hard to issue deposit returns to people who've paid for things using credit cards. Credit cards exist explicitly for consumption, not for you to get paid. Deposit systems that used to work quite well are now working a lot less well because the currency we use has radically changed in the background. Coins used to be worth something but are now worth very little. So having a coin return mechanism is getting less and less feasible for a deposit system. Intermediaries take a large cut of fees on transactions and it's hard to electronically take money as a deposit and have that entire amount returned to a customer. It might be possible to do this by paying fees to the payment processors to facilitate it all, but then money is leaving the hands of the store and their customers. I found this request highly distasteful and I wasn't wiling to take the work on because I think amusement parks should provide water for "free" to their customers since it's an amenity that should be covered by the cost of entry. Much like I think it's appropriate to provide toilets to the customers as part of the entrance fee I would not accept work that was putting payment systems on toilet doors for venues that people have paid a lot of money to visit in the first place. Ultimately these societal issues can only be fixed by improving societal behaviors, trying to address these with financial incentives only will likely be doomed to fail for a number of reasons.