There’s nothing worse than walking home and seeing someone’s discarded shopping trolley upturned on the side of the path or sitting there rusting away lodged in a river.

If there was ever a perfect symbol for urban decay then surely the discarded shopping trolley would be a strong contender.

I’m not exactly sure when they were first introduced but sometime during my childhood the coin operated trolley made it’s debut and has always struck me as one of those common sense ideas.

People are lazy idiots and unless you hit them in the hip pocket there’s always going to be morons who ruin it for the rest of us. Case in point coming back to your car after some shopping and seeing someone else’s discarded trolley sitting against your car door.

For this and many other consequences of offering free trolleys it’s a no brainer that coin operated trolleys are generally speaking a good idea.

Well, unless of course you live in Queensland.

For some inexplicable reason Queenslanders have been inundating Woolworths with negative customer feedback on their use of coin operated trolleys. Yesterday Woolworths announced that they are now reviewing the trolleys across several sites in Queensland.

To be fair, I thought I’d try and think of some reasons to justify the complaints but came up rather short.

The obvious one of course is the convenience factor; many people live cashless nowadays so carrying around a $1 or $2 coin is a bit of an effort.

To counter this however Aldi in particular sell little keyring things that you can attach to your keys and use as a coin substitute – problem solved.

The other reason was that it encourages begging and harassment from bums wanting to take your trolley in for you to pick up the coin. This one’s obviously a bit more harder to combat but if it really is out of control I don’t think it’s anything the supermarkets themselves couldn’t sort out. They are build on private land and as far as I know are able to evict you from the premises (including carparks).

If the bums persist call the police in. Works for shoplifters so why not people harassing customers?

Despite sitting down and thinking about it for a good twenty minutes those are the only two positives I could come up with for discarding the trolleys.

The negatives however are a dime a dozen. Discarded free trolleys are aesthetically polluting, damage cars as they roll around the carpark, are expensive to replace which is a cost ultimately paid for by customers, usually come with wonky wheels due to misuse and discourage personal responsibility.

Why on earth would you oppose coin operated trolleys if all of these problems are easily remedied by the use of them? If anything coin operated trolleys should become law.

Harden up Queensland, lazy idiots ruined free trolleys for the rest of us and no amount of whinging is going to make them start taking responsibility. If the rest of Australia can learn to carry around some coins or buy a trolley token then so can you.



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