Could I make a little gun and just walk around through the parking lot and aisles of the supermarket and freeze all the carts in place?
Bubbles has joined the chat.
Here’s a decent rundown.
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/28/tech-in-plain-sight-shopping-cart-locks/
What’s interesting about these carts is that they only ever seem to be deployed at stores that I wouldn’t think were prone to cart theft, to begin with. They’re always in the nicer neighborhoods at the overpriced stores that nobody should be shopping at in the first place.
Meanwhile, every cart at the stores in the worse neighborhoods look like they’ve been used as target practice for an M1 Abrams tank, have no locks, and can be found scattered on random street corners for a 3 mile radius from the store.
Retailers in wealthier areas have larger budgets, higher profit margins, and more attention by the executives. The favorite managers get assigned to the better stores and regions because obviously it involves better bonuses and better quality of life. They then invest in bullshit security upgrades because they can, and the C-suite believes they work because, well, the managers saying they work were already the favorites.
Retailers in lower income neighborhoods literally can’t afford long-term investments - corporate runs them on razor-thin margins, assigns them the worst managers by default and doesn’t trust those managers, and underpays their staff such that they’re constantly dealing with turnover.
Even if they found the temporary budget to install the security measures, they would still need a permanent budget to maintain them, and it still wouldn’t be worth it because:
- if $X worth of shopping carts walk out the door, and you add $Y worth of security measures… now $X+$Y are walking out the door.
- if shopping carts are constantly locking up and malfunctioning due to underfunded maintenance, $Z worth of shopping carts are now sitting in the store doing nothing, which in the corporate world is almost as bad as that money walking out the door.
Yeah, I just watched a youtuber take apart a modern one. Found the maker and the manual for the system. Then watched some more people taking the system apart (including the one you linked)
Neat stuff:
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Looks like it’s <9 Khz signals (7.2khz in the one I looked up), at that frequency, you can do a replay attack using your phones speaker from 0 distance.
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the electronics in the wheels are potted, including the battery so they’re disposable at EOL.
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Apparently, the unlock signal is just an inverted lock signal. Easily detectable.
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Their system has the ability to lock/unlock all carts, only the carts left in the parking lot overnight.
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One of the features available is for them to identify and freeze a particular cart if it doesn’t go through a checkout.
I want to answer your question, but
Could I make a little gun and just walk around through the parking lot and aisles of the supermarket and freeze all the carts in place?
Means I won’t do so. Why would you do that to people?
Why would you do that to people?
Some people just want to see the world burn. Better something mildly inconvenient like this than, say, voting fascists into power for the lulz, I guess.
Your shopping cart will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
There are valid applications for it. It could be used to slow shop lifters if they are trying to use a cart to get to a vehicle in the parking lot. It could also be used to help close specific aisles or portions of the store where customers should not be.
This guy does not seem like he’s interested in ‘valid applications’, he’s interested in being a dick.
I wouldn’t* jump straight to “being a dick,” I have had many of these thoughts that I would never actually do in real life, but I want to know if it’s possible so I can shit on dumb technology hahaha
Shopping cart wheels here only freeze for one reason: crappy bearrings that get jammed up when people run through pools of spilled grape juice and maple syrup.
