Geofenced

Thu, 4 Apr 2024 23:56:00 -0500

I encountered a technology this week that I haven't come across before. Normally, that would be a source of great joy for me, but this time, not so much.

Theskinnyonbenny family went on our first full provisioning run in a couple of months. We're liquor-drinking Americans with two teenage boys, so we can set a grocery store's stockholders into fits of rapturous joy.

Yesterday, we had two carts full, a lot of which was heavy -- potatoes, cat litter, and bottles of water, beer, soft drinks, and I'm not even sure what else. I know we didn't have wine. We're still packed to the hilt with Croatian and Italian wine.

Our thought -- actually a suggestion that one of the other sailers in town made -- was to just walk the shopping carts from the store down to the dock. It's less than a 10 minute walk. Then, we would unload and bring the carts back.

When the first cart made it to the edge of the parking lot, one of its wheels locked up. V tried to shove harder, and it looked like it was fighting back. In a minute, all of the wheels were bricks.

The second cart got to about the same place and did the same thing. We realized that the shopping carts were somehow geofenced, and started lugging super heavy shopping bags in a series of trips.

Ko speculated that they must really have an issue with carts being taken by homeless people before almost immediately realizing that we haven't seen a single homeless person in Europe. Just imagine the time and expense of geofencing ones shopping carts. Now all of that just to prevent boaters from using them as dock carts.