None of the others in town have these, thought it was unusual enough to share
My local store uses these but they lock up if you bring them out to the 2nd row of parking spaces out front. It’s enough to get the cart to your car, then you go to return it and it’s totally locked, so everyone just shoves them into the planters in a big pile of tipped over carts instead of physically lifting the whole thing and hefting it to the cart returns to return it. The store has signs everywhere now telling people not to throw carts into the planters, and the employees know the problem, and the city has evidently complained multiple times, but district management evidently refuses to believe it’s got anything to do with the cart locks and I was told by an exasperated checker that they’re apparently considering getting security guards to confront people and make them return carts?? lmaooo
They’d be better off getting security guards to help people carry shit to their cars.
apparently considering getting security guards to confront people and make them return carts?
Oh that’s going to go down just great. How long until some rent-a-cop ends up under a car?
3 minutes. I give it 3 minutes.
Oh no, not security guards! What are they gonna do, lecture me?
Some Walmart GM must have a brother or something with an anti-theft wheel business because wtf?
some models use a wire in the ground that emits a low frequency radio signal… which can be also be transmitted by the speaker in a phone by simply playing these mp3 files: https://www.tmplab.org/2008/06/18/consumer-b-gone/ (!)
Of course, it’s not the sound that blocks the wheel but the electromagnetic parasites that are produced by the coil in any speaker
What the fuck am I reading?
Given the current behavior of autocorrect, I’m assuming that’s not the author’s fault. My brain has reached the point that it skips over that and just reads “currents.” I don’t know how you get from a typo for currents to become parasites, but I’ve seen even worse corrections in my writing.
My guess would be “interference” that got autocorrected.
It’s absolutely insane that a speaker coil works as an antenna in this case, but perhaps even more insane that the signal survives mp3 compression.
Why is that insane? The entire point of an mp3 file is to be able to reproduce signals with reasonable accuracy. Seems like the signal has a frequency of around 8khz, which is very much in the range of human hearing and should be preserved by an mp3.
No, the point of MP3 is to compress audio in a lossy manner while minimizing the introduction of artifacts detectable by human hearing using psychoacoustic analysis. The coincidence that the necessary parasitic EM signal induced by speaker drivers happens to be created by a signal that doesn’t suffer degradation by a relatively specific lossy compression method is remarkable.
Right, but artifacts in the ~8khz range will be detectable by human hearing. mp3s are going to be perfectly acceptable for many sounds in that frequency range… The fact that this works is evidence of that.
Plus, you know what else is lossy? Radio. If the signal is that fragile there’s a good chance the locking mechanism wouldn’t work in the first place.
Go actually read about MP3 compression before you continue misusing the term “lossy.”
It’s just going to be pulses of an 8khz signal. Why would an MP3 not encode this just fine?
Like I said before, the coincidence is what’s remarkable.
We’ve had these in the UK for a long time, mainly to stop people carting shopping home using the trolley and then abandoning it.
There is a walmart locally that has these or used to have them. Theirs were easy enough to disable.
Was I the only one who thought the wheel was laying on the ground?
Yes. You are the only one.
Those things have been around for a long time.
I remember them being introduced at least 15 years ago. My manager at the time would wait and laugh at people trying to take them past the parking lot. She was a really miserable person.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t even work anymore just because of how long they’ve been around.
I’ve never bothered to try it recently though.
My grocery store just got these and I didn’t know about it. Mine went off as I was going out the door and I was like “wtf is happening here” until the self checkout girl saw and came over to release it.
I’ve only ever seen these in malls so you don’t take the carts to other places in the mall. Do they really use these for carts going out to the parking lot too? How’re you supposed to get your groceries out of the store?
Just have the greeters chase down any missing carts, they’re already on security detail anyway.
How do they work
I’m guessing a magnet that engages if it’s given a kill signal? RFID for location. Must have some sort of battery too.
Battery? Holy shit that would be a pain in the ass to maintain.
Yeah, at least in germany these are all just magnets. And outside of the store there is a long metal line, and when you roll over it, the wheel with the magnet completely locks. This happened to me as a kid, and it was sheer impossible moving the cart back to the store.
You ever seen those invisible dog fences? Once it crosses an electrical barrier it triggers an alarm of sorts and in this case I assume it engages some sort of brake mechanism.
It depends on the exact location of the store… pretty common in urban areas. Makes sense as carts cost hundreds of dollars and people will just walk off with them and ditch them once they get home, or of course homeless people often take them and use them for a while. First time I saw this was in Uptown Minneapolis about 20 years ago. Seen them all over since then. I found a brand new Safeway cart in the alley behind my house and was ‘great!’. I wheeled it into my yard and then wondered wtf I was planning to do with it exactly. Apparently, if you call them they have someone who goes around picking up carts, so I let them know and someone from the store came and got it.
these are pretty common at supercenters in Chicagoland
Locking or not, at least the American buggies don’t have rotating back wheels. I don’t know what Australia & England were thinking, but these bad ideas got imported where I live nom & they are needlessly difficult to maneuver.
haha yes no more criminal activity
We did it boys! We solved theft!
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