Trolley abuse – like this one thrown into a tree – is nothing new but numbers are rising each year. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
One wonders what the late American supermarket tycoon Sylvan Goldman would think if he returned from the dead to check on the famous invention he unveiled in 1937.
He produced the first prototype of what we know now as the shopping trolley.
Back then it was a small folding basket on wheels not dissimilar to what we have now.
Sadly, I think Goldman would be mightily disappointed over how things have turned out for his brainchild, based on the soaring numbers of dumped and stolen trolleys each year.
Unlike most people, I unashamedly love grocery shopping and prefer a trolley to a basket any old day.
The new sleek ones at our local supermarket glide like champion ice-skaters one minute and the next they are reliable rest supports when you stop for a mid-aisle chat with friends.
But lately I’ve noticed numbers in the new batch seem to be dwindling and I have a sneaking suspicion they’ve fallen into the hands of the notorious trolley abusers, who by now have probably dumped them on sports ovals, creeks or in bushes.
Trolley abuse is not new but the numbers are blowing out each year according to the online platform, Snap, Send, Solve. In 2025, it received just under a whopping 150,000 notifications of abandoned and stolen trolleys Australia-wide.
That’s more than double the 66,625 car thefts reported for the same period.
Some commentators are putting it down to a shaky economy and the sky-high cost of petrol, but that doesn’t give people the right to turn our trolleys into their private EVs.
Some trolley thieves are so brazen they proudly park them in their front yard and use them for the weekly shop.
What riles most people are not so much the offenders who take the trolleys with intent to steal, but more the people who can’t be bothered walking four or five steps to return their trolley to its bay when they’re done unpacking them.
When I see people parked in the side streets around the supermarket close their car boot leaving their trolley just standing there like a lost child my blood boils.
I turn into a full-on Karen wanting to shout “have you forgotten something, moron”. But I know it would only end badly with a screaming match, possible physical injury and a court appearance that achieves nothing.
To make it worse, they often leave the trolleys in places that block pathways making it impossible for prams and people on mobility devices to get through.
There are other less obvious drawbacks about this “cut and run” behaviour I discovered recently when I pulled up on the perimeter of my local supermarket.
As I wheeled my trolley into the bay a youngish man about 30 came up and thanked me.
He also had a trolley in tow but it wasn’t his.
“I live across the road and people coming out of the supermarket often leave their trolleys outside our units, which end up rolling around and scratching our cars,” he explained.
So he’s now stuck with cleaning up the mess for strangers on what appeared to be his day off work, which is another example of how trolley laziness impacts on other people.
There are regulations in place and fines can be issued to both the offenders and supermarkets by local government, but supermarkets tend to take the softly, softly approach by sending out trucks to track down reported sightings.
If anybody is fined it usually ends up being the supermarkets, who are legally required to pick up the stragglers within three hours.
What makes this sorry saga a tricky issue to solve is that there are a lot of people in vulnerable situations where supermarket trolleys provide a community service.
It would be a cold-hearted world to penalise, say, an elderly person, who does their shopping and then has to walk some distance to catch a bus home. How are they expected to get their trolley back to base?
Or the homeless who often use trolleys to cart their belongings from one miserable location to the next.
As for what old man Goldman would make of this mess, he’d probably push on knowing that his trolley was widely ridiculed in the beginning, but he turned it into a raging success with sheer persistence.
