A Colorado city council has started fining retailers like Walmart and Albertsons for every shopping cart found off store property, charging up to $95 per cart under a new fee schedule that took effect immediately.
Pueblo's city council passed a resolution establishing a tiered penalty system for abandoned shopping carts: a $35 impoundment fee for each cart recovered away from a retailer's premises, a $2 daily storage charge, and a $50 surcharge for repeat offenses. The fees fund impoundment and what the city calls "administrative disposal." All told, a single cart can cost a business up to $95 before repeat-offense charges even kick in, The Sun reported.
The new fee schedule builds on an ordinance Pueblo passed in September 2024 that made retailers responsible for maintaining, securing, and retrieving every cart they put into circulation. That earlier measure laid the groundwork; the resolution that just passed adds the dollar amounts.
Walmart and Albertsons were named among the retailers affected. Neither chain's specific response appeared in city council proceedings. But the financial exposure is real: a large-format store can lose hundreds of carts a year, and at $95 apiece, plus $50 each time a business racks up repeat violations, the tab adds up fast.
Pueblo does offer one escape hatch. Businesses that install or design a "cart management system" can have all fees waived. The city has not publicly defined what qualifies as an acceptable system, whether that means wheel-locking technology, physical barriers, or something else entirely.
That ambiguity matters. A retailer trying to comply has no published standard to meet, yet faces immediate penalties if carts wander off the lot.
Councilman Roger Gomez pushed back at a recent council meeting, proposing that the fee schedule be delayed further. His concern was straightforward: the city was moving without enough information.
"We don't have access to enough research and also we're not the only municipality dealing with this problem. So I'd like to pull from that kind of data."
Gomez also warned that retailers could be "put in jeopardy" simply for having shopping carts, a blunt acknowledgment that the ordinance penalizes stores for a problem driven largely by the people who walk off with the carts, not the businesses that own them.
Whether the full council voted down Gomez's delay or tabled it remains unclear from available records. The fee schedule took effect immediately regardless.
Abandoned shopping carts are a genuine nuisance. They clog sidewalks, litter drainage channels, and signal disorder. No one disputes that. But Pueblo's approach shifts the entire cost of enforcement onto the retailers, not onto the individuals who steal or abandon the carts in the first place.
A grocery store operating on thin margins in a mid-sized Colorado city now faces a per-cart fine that can exceed the replacement cost of the cart itself. And the "cart management system" waiver, undefined as it is, could require significant capital investment in technology or infrastructure, costs that inevitably land on consumers through higher prices or reduced services.
Pueblo is not the only city grappling with cart abandonment, as Gomez himself noted. But choosing to fine the victim of the theft rather than pursue the person who committed it is a policy choice that deserves scrutiny. It is easier for a city to bill Walmart than to track down whoever rolled a cart six blocks and left it in a ditch.
When government finds it simpler to fine a business than enforce the law against the people actually causing the problem, the result is not accountability, it is a shakedown with a resolution number.