The Sophisticated Shopping Cart Thieves of North Las Vegas
The Las Vegas press continuously covered issues with the theft of shopping carts from area stores over the decades, including reporting on a “sophisticated” gang of shopping cart thieves operating in North Las Vegas in early 1972. Local grocery stores took a variety of efforts to protect their carts from being misappropriated, including publishing ads about the issue next to coupons. (Las Vegas-Clark County Library District/LVRJ).
thieves seeking chrome fortunes
In April of 1972 – amidst mob influence of the Strip and a nationwide violent crime wave – a different sort of illicit enterprise was brewing in North Las Vegas. A gang of “sophisticated thieves” was striking it rich by stealing thousands of shopping carts from area grocery stores.
Concerned citizens and representatives of local grocery stores attended a North Las Vegas City Council meeting on April 3, 1972 to express their concern over both rampant theft of shopping carts but also the nuisance caused by discarded carts left along roadways.
Chief of security for Food City Markets told the City Council that approximately 6,000 shopping carts had been stolen from Las Vegas area stores in the past year, with these thefts costing his chain $20,000. One heist at a local store snatched 60 carts in one go.
Newell also said that a three-month investigation by two state agencies determined that a gang of thieves was specifically targeting shopping carts at grocery stores around North Las Vegas. The shopping cart theft ring then transported the stolen carts to buyers in Southern California and Mexico, where a premium was paid for the chrome plating on the carts. However, some of the stolen carts were believed to have been resold on the black market at rock-bottom prices to small independent grocery stores.
There was never an indication after this City Council meeting that any arrests were made in connection with the shopping cart theft ring.
Wayward shopping carts outside of a Las Vegas Smith’s (Anthony T. Smith 2022)
“forgetting” to return carts
While the shopping cart crime syndicate accounted for a decent portion of lost carts around North Las Vegas, the other contributing factor was patrons taking shopping carts from stores and then abandoning or keeping them. In this nationwide problem, one shopkeeper in Los Angeles noted that most of the patrons that kept carts from his store were “little old ladies” that “forgot” to return their borrowed shopping carts.
A Las Vegas newspaper account noted people that take shopping carts home used them as “laundry baskets, kid’s toys, and barbecues.” And according to local press accounts, another semi-frequent use of shopping carts was by kids participating in informal demolition derbies in store parking lots.
The substantial costs incurred by area stores due to lost shopping carts gave rise to an entirely new business – shopping cart retrieval services that contracted with retailers to return abandoned carts. An owner of one of these companies noted to a reporter with the Las Vegas Review-Journal that retrieving misappropriated shopping carts could sometimes pose a difficult task, saying “It’s the people who hoard them, put them behind fences with dogs and send a message that they don’t want you to have the carts back who are the worst. People can become very possessive about the carts.”
This author recalls when growing up in the early-90’s there was an Albertson’s shopping cart involuntarily decommissioned from use in transporting groceries so that it could sit in the backyard of our home near Valley View and Sahara, where it gained far-better use as a repository for pool supplies.