Showing posts with label extracting the coin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label extracting the coin. Show all posts
When I started binning, back in 2004, several supermarkets had adopted coin deposit systems to deter people from walking off with shopping carts. Idle carts were nested together, and daisy-chained, handle-to-handle. A customer could unlock the cart at the very end of the chain by depositing a coin in the locking mechanism of the cart -- either a quarter, or a dollar coin -- in Canada, a so-called "Loonie." Pushing in the coin, pushed out the chain link connected to the next cart. Pushing that chain link back in pushed out your quarter. Simple.
Stores may not have reckoned on how many customers just wouldn't care enough about recovering their deposit to put the carts away properly. And then there were a number deliberately leaving the carts unchained so binners could re-chain the carts, and recover the coins.
Binners immediately started trying to extract the coins from carts found in the wild. If you found two carts, you could use the chain from one to recover the coin from the other. I began to see bent up lengths of coat hanger wire jammed in the chaining end of the coin box, which "fooled" the cart into releasing it's coin.
Stores may not have reckoned on how many customers just wouldn't care enough about recovering their deposit to put the carts away properly. And then there were a number deliberately leaving the carts unchained so binners could re-chain the carts, and recover the coins.
Binners immediately started trying to extract the coins from carts found in the wild. If you found two carts, you could use the chain from one to recover the coin from the other. I began to see bent up lengths of coat hanger wire jammed in the chaining end of the coin box, which "fooled" the cart into releasing it's coin.
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