It’s Not the Stores’ Fault
22nd January 2020
In Lakewood, Wash., some of the city’s homeless and other residents have made a habit of stealing shopping carts from various grocery and retail outlets and dumping the carts on road verges and other public-facing locales. The number of cart-related complaints made to the municipal government increased 40 percent in 2019, and Lakewood officials claim the scattered carts make the city appear “blighted.”
The city’s proposed solution to this state of affairs, which residents say threatens property values, is not to punish the vagrants — whose theft and subsequent disposal of private property inconveniences the stores and the broader public — but instead to fine the stores from which the property is stolen.
How very ‘woke’.
East coast cities, such as New York and New Haven, have long prevented this problem by putting a line of concrete-filled metal posts round their exits, wide enough apart for a normal body to pass through but too close together for a cart to fit.