A shopping cart thief who has stolen an estimated 200 shopping carts in the Grand Region over the years has been stopped in his tracks by the ingenious preventative measures of a Luxembourg supermarket.
The supermarket, which is located in Kirchberg, has for years attached a device to each shopping cart that requires a 50-cent or euro coin to be unlocked. If the user returns the cart, he or she gets back the money.
Manager David Grossier says that to date, no one has ever been happy about the system, and in fact it is regularly cited by customers as the thing that pisses them off the most – and most likely to drive them to rush into the store and kick over a whole display of stacked toilet paper.
“I understand that our valued customers lose precious minutes of their lives by having to dig through messy handbags or run back to their cars to look for a coin between the seats as they say, ‘Why, why must we do this?’” he said. “But I always knew that one day our system would pay off.”
Witnesses said that the suspect, obviously from a neighboring country because Luxembourg residents are a good, law-abiding people, tried to remove a shopping cart with the aim of selling it on the black market for hundreds of euros.
However, when he saw that he would lose 50 cents, he became angry, cursed in the regional dialect of an area adjacent to Luxembourg, and fled on foot before police arrived.
“We have been vindicated,” Grossier said. “May this crook tell all his crook friends that in Luxembourg, we protect our shopping carts.”
