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You see them everywhere – halfway down the side of a river bank, toppled over and trashed, or laying in the middle of your favourite Winnipeg park.

Shopping carts are stolen and abandoned on a regular basis, but what do you do when you see one? It’s as easy as making a phone call.

Speedy Cart Services picks up abandoned carts for all the stores in Winnipeg except for WalMart and Superstore – and they’re picking up as many as 10 to 30 daily from every store in the city.

Yearly, that’s hundreds of thousands of carts, so many that Speedy Cart couldn’t immediately give an exact number.

“We’ve been around since 1979,” said Speedy Cart Services owner Jose Baires. “We keep the city clean.” Tweet This

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Between 20 to 100 calls are logged daily at the service in Winnipeg, and depending on where the drivers are, carts are picked up within a week.

An abandoned shopping cart in a ravine. Wikipedia Commons

Deterrent methods such as chaining up carts haven’t made much of a difference in terms of keeping carts from wandering away, so business has been steady, said Baires.

Businesses contract services like Speedy Cart to pick up their lost carts, so calling a service to pick it up doesn’t cost anything for someone to make the call, he added.

“They can call our hotline, that’s 24/7, and leave an address, or call during business hours to talk to a person.” All carts are picked up and brought back to the store from which they were taken.

Speedy Cart Services can be reached at 204-786-7600. For WalMart and Superstore Carts, call Total Cart Management at 204-296-9968.

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