Shopping Carts in the City--kind of like gold on wheels

After we moved to New York a couple of years ago, I was alarmed the first couple of times we ventured to the grocery store to find the storefront looking like this. I couldn't figure out for a minute why a store would purposefully make their entrance look so...unwelcoming (at least it seemed that way to my untrained southern eye). I thought it must be a mistake or a grocery store chain that had fallen off her rocker, until I visited several more grocery stores that had the same bars covering their storefront. I think Sam finally had to explain to me that the bars were not a poor design choice, but a way of keeping people from STEALING the carts. In a place where few people have cars to transport groceries home, baskets with wheels aka carts are a hot commodity, as it turns out. You see homeless folks carrying around their valuables in them. But I guess other people have been known to snatch a cart or two, if the opportunity presented itself and they had so many bags to be desperate for something to help them get their loot home.

When working in the city on a show a couple of months back, I was assisting with the stocking of dressing rooms and we had to buy copious amounts of bottled water for the likes of Ludacris and Soulja Boy. I was all, "how the crap are we going to get 500 bottles of water back to the dressing rooms?" (which were a good 4 blocks away). Well, in some stores (K Mart in this instance) they will let you borrow the cart on the condition that you leave your driver's license with them. Who knew? A final note on the magic of carts:

it's silly but most Targets in the area are two stories and come with their very own separate escalator for your cart. I love pushing it in there and watching it ratchet up to the second floor, while we ride alongside on the human escalator. It probably makes up for the barred grocery store inconvenience that I experience elsewhere, it's so magical.