Steve Rogerson talks with Gareth Mitchell from Heliot on how IoT can help solve the problem of abandoned shopping trolleys.

I am old enough to remember when shopping trolleys – or carts as they call them in the USA – were a real problem. Town and city streets used to be littered with them, abandoned by shoppers who used them to carry their goods home but could not be bothered to return them to the supermarket.

Many were reused for other purposes, often as a means for carrying different things, including luggage; suitcases didn’t have wheels in those days. Some even chopped them up and converted them into barbeques. But basically they were a nuisance, ending up in rivers and parks and hedges.

Those days seemed to be over, as first they were fitted with special wheels that locked when they left the supermarket car park. Or to use them you had to insert a coin that you could only recover by returning the trolley to its parking area.

While both these deterred the casual trolley thief, there were ways round both methods and so the odd trolley still went missing. Well, I thought it was the odd trolley until I talked this week with Gareth Mitchell, who is in charge of UK sales for IoT connectivity provider Heliot (www.heliotgroup.com).

He told me supermarkets were still losing around a tenth of their trolleys each year, and they are not cheap to replace. Adding to the problem in the UK are some local councils that have started fining supermarkets or charging them for trolley recovery if they end up in unsuitable locations.

This can become expensive. The Food Marketing Institute in Washington DC says the annual cost of shopping trolley theft worldwide is a massive $800m (calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/ever-borrowed-a-shopping-cart-youre-part-of-an-800-million-global-problem-from-the-archives). It is also bad publicity; these trolleys proudly bear the name or logo of the supermarket from which they came.

As such, shop owners are looking to solve this problem but, as Gareth pointed out, they don’t want to spend a lot of money on it, and he believes IoT has the answer in the form of inexpensive trackers that can be attached discreetly to the trolleys and will activate when they leave a geofenced area round the supermarket. They can use wifi or LPWAN technology to communicate and GPS to provide their location.

“These trackers can come in all shapes and sizes,” he told me. “If they are looking just to track the trolley out to the car park, there is one way of doing it, but if they are looking to go within a kilometre or two of the store, they will need different technology.”

LPWAN typically provides more consistent and cost-effective connectivity, and can be effective in hard-to-reach locations, such as underground car parks, where cellular connectivity might struggle. Depending on how the network is configured and the kind of LPWAN used, the range of connectivity varies from a few kilometres to 1000 kilometres. The data transmission necessary to track the trolleys is also low, keeping costs and battery drain down.

Gareth was a little vague on exactly how low the costs were, but the tracker itself is typically between £30 and £60 depending on volumes and the type of device used; this is not insignificant given new trolleys cost between £150 and £600. Plus, there are the other ongoing data costs, subscription fees and so on. However, once these are fitted, shops can use the data they provide for other purposes.

If you can track the movement of trolleys around the store and the car park, then you can gather valuable information on the routes people follow, helping with the placement of in-store adverts and goods that you want to sell quickly, for example.

As an aside, the trackers can also be attached to roll cages that are used to transfer goods from warehouses to the store and for shelf stacking in the store. These too go missing or end up in the wrong warehouse or shop, so knowing where each one is can be useful.

I can’t help wonder though whether this is a short-term fix as the trend seems to be towards stores with far more sophisticated tracking that even monitors what goods people buy and put in their trolleys so they can be charged without queuing at the checkout. With that technology, an extra tracker on the trolley is probably unnecessary. The “short-term” though is likely to be quite long. I see shoppers still refusing to use self-service tills and it could be many years before fully autonomous stores are widespread.

As such, these trackers may be an option for a lot of supermarkets, including small local ones, but they will have to balance the cost of the technology against how many trolleys they actually lose each year and what other methods there are for stopping their theft. If more councils take to fining supermarkets for abandoned trolleys, then this could boost the use of the trackers.

As to me, well when I shop I walk to my local supermarket and use a basket to make sure I don’t buy more than I can carry. But that doesn’t mean I am not affected by trolleys. The picture at this head of this article I took yesterday as I walked to my local store, showing that, yes, abandoned trolleys are still an eyesore.