More than $13K worth of wayward shopping carts have been returned to their Myrtle Beach homes

Near a regularly used homeless encampment on the outskirts of Myrtle Beach on a recent October, a stockpile of Walmart shopping carts sat nearby.

Arranged in two lines, the empty buggies arrived days earlier.

“I might get in trouble pushing them back. They might think that I stole them,” a man sitting nearby who identified himself as homeless but declined to give his name said.

However they ended up there, those vacant buggies are an expensive part of doing business

Between April and September alone, Myrtle Beach’s “Gold Cap Ambassadors” recovered more than 120 waylaid carts across dozens of city blocks — representing roughly $13,000 worth of recovered value to area merchants, Downtown Business Alliance president Amy Barrett said.

The gold-clad workers have patrolled downtown since 2020 picking up trash, providing hospitality and reporting problems to city officials.

Mike Snow, operations manager for the ambassadors, said his crew had collected displaced shopping carts for years, but officials only began tracking the numbers in the spring to get an idea of how bad the problem is.

“Most of them come from stores within our district, but we’ve done Target, we’ve done Home Depot, we’ve done Lowe’s,” he said. “Obviously, the closer you get areas that have them, you see more, but they’re really all over.”

Rocateq, a global leader in cart theft prevention, says an average cart costs between $75 and $100 each.

Within the food industry alone, almost 2 million carts are taken annually, according to the Food Marketing Institute.

In addition to returning property, Snow said the cart removal effort helps beautify parts of the city most frequented by visitors - the Boardwalk and its surrounding streets.

“Not every shopping cart we find is empty. A lot of times, they’ve got trash in them,” Snow said.

City spokesman Mark Kruea said there are plans to outlaw the use of abandoned or stray carts, though some communities either do or are considering it.

In the California city of Citrus Heights, officials are crafting an ordinance making stray carts a public nuisance. The measure would require any business with more than five carts to submit a theft prevention plan and possession of an abandoned one a citable offense.

The Newport News Times in Oregon reported over the summer that officials there are considering a similar law - with fines of between $50 and $500 assessed to businesses that don’t retrieve shopping carts reported abandoned within 72 hours.

S.C. Retail Association executive director Lee Ann Watson said her organization doesn’t have specific data on shopping cart thefts, but said their disappearances are a burden to businesses.

“Not only do retailers invest substantial dollars in the carts, but also in resources like additional staff and anti-theft systems,” she told The Sun News via email. “Ultimately, the cost of retail crime and its prevention flows down, in part, to the consumer. Meaning any theft - whether it be carts or inventory — impacts us all.”