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Help find our ‘lost’ trolleys

Posted on November 4, 2011

THE ‘Wanted’ poster with its offer of a $1000 reward sits on the wall of Mildura’s Woolworths supermarket – but it doesn’t refer to the old ‘dead or alive’ bounty hunter days of the Wild West.

ELPING HAND: One of Mildura Trolleymaster’s leading hands, Clayton Chapman, is kept on the run four days a week at Centro making sure shoppers have plenty of trolleys, especially the new black version that is favoured by seniors.

The latest poster is in reference to the Great Mildura Trolley Disappearing ‘Trick,’ and it’s not just Woolies who are on the receiving end.

Mildura Trolleymaster’s Vince Barcak, 58, says Mildura trolleys are disappearing at the rate of around 20 a week.

It’s an ever-increasing problem that is costing the big supermarkets many thousands of dollars a year, and inadvertently costing customers in mark-ups to compensate for the cost of replacements.

And they’re not cheap – up to $600 each for the big trolleys, and between $300-$350 for the new-style black trolleys that are popular with the older shoppers.

Woolworths bought 200 of the black trolleys in June, to be shared between its supermarkets, Langtree Avenue in the Central Business District, and out at Centro.

But according to Vince, half of them are already on the missing list – at a cost so far of more than $30,000!

Vince said the problem of disappearing trolleys was the bane of supermarkets and other big users, such as Kmart and Target.

But it is supermarkets such as Woolies, Coles and Fishers who are really feeling the pinch, with one supermarket along losing 70 of its new small red trolleys in just six months! It’s one of the reasons that some have introduced a rewards program in an effort to stem the tide.

Vince said that in the case of Woolworths, if passers-by returned trolleys to the store, or gave information as to their whereabouts, their names were placed in a monthly draw that sees them in the running for $1000 worth of groceries.

Of course, it’s Australia-wide, but Vince can recall at least two Mildura people who have been on the receiving end simply by phoning in a trolley’s whereabouts.

It’s not a topic that is on everyone’s lips, but trolleys are big business, and at any one time there might be 1500 available in the Mildura area alone. Vince is responsible for collecting any strays, making sure that supermarkets are regularly ‘stocked up,’ with trolleys neatly ‘racked and stacked’ in car parks, and he has a team of two permanents and 22 casuals working Mildura and Renmark outlets.

He’s been on the job for a few years now, and says it never ceases to amaze him where some trolleys are found. The most unusual find was an old trolley at Mansell Reserve…it had been there so long that a 12ft tree was actually growing up through it.

Trolleys have also been found in the river, on top of street signs and statues, in remote locations out on the Calder and Sturt Highways, on fruit blocks…and many are recovered from the more popular of the 13 backpacker hostels that operate in Sunraysia.

Vince says the recovery rate isn’t bad, with at least 200 abandoned trolleys retrieved weekly from around the district, but as many as 250 a year go on the permanent ‘missing list.’ One of the major supermarkets alone lost 200 of the trolleys in a two-year period.

Many of the trolleys that are retrieved have been damaged, some beyond repair. The smaller recently-introduced black trolleys that are popular with the older supermarket customers are disappearing at an alarming rate, and very few are being recovered.

Vince said it wasn’t unusual for him and his team to spend up to 14 hours a day, come rain, hail or shine, sometimes as late as midnight, seven days a week, trying to locate and return wayward trolleys to their respective supermarkets. The problem with disappearing Coles trolleys eased a bit when the supermarket introduced its coin-in-the-slot trolley return system, but maby are still on the missing list.

Vince says the continual search for, and replacement of, supermarket trolleys is an ongoing problem, and he has urged shoppers who walk the trolleys home to either return them, contact the supermarket to let them know of its whereabouts, or leave them in plain sight on a nature strip so they can be easily retrieved.

The service available for trolley retrieval is via a simple email to trolleymaster@bigpond.com, or by a text message only to 0418147841. The number to ring to be in with a chance for the Woolworths reward program is 1800641497, the number for Coles is 1800876553, while people who find an IGA trolley should contact their local Fishers store.

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