Shopping carts are big business in North America! According to research, a new cart can run a tab as high as $400 for a retailer. Multiply that figure, sometimes by the hundreds, for a single big box store, and the overall numbers can be staggering.
Equally astonishing, is the lack of care that we as consumers show these carts. Many of us don't give a second thought when returning carts to their holding area, if indeed, we return them at all. It appears, in many cases, to make no difference to us at all if they jam inside one another, or even if we leave them out in the middle of a parking lot. Though we may not seem to care, each destroyed or abandoned cart is big dollars, and in the end affects our grocery bills.
Luckily, for the North American retailer, there are a few companies out there who have taken notice and come up with a simple solution to cut back on the number of carts that simply get tossed. And this is where Latem Industries comes in. We aren't the superhero in this story, but our customer(s) is. If they're Batman, we're Robin, or perhaps even Robin's half brother.
Over the last few years we have had the pleasure of working with a number of new customers outside of our traditional automotive comfort zone. The 'Batman' in this story has set quite the reputation for themselves in the retail industry for refurbishing shopping carts. Aside from the huge environmental benefit this adds to our landfil sites, there is a big financial benefit to our nations retailers, who can purchase a refurbished cart for a fraction of the cost of new.
Our role in this as Batman's assistant is to simply clean up the carts, removing lose and unwanted contaminants from the surface before they are re-coated. Latem Industries works very closely with a few other sub contractors to ensure efficient results.
We often talk in our blog about the beauty of being at the hub of Canada's automotive manufactuing community. We'd be foolish not to appreciate how central our location is, but we would also like to comment on how fortunate we are, to have many other top quality non-automotive customers to work with. And it doesn't stop with the customers. Some of the other suppliers that we work with hand-in-hand, to support the same customer, are also top shelf.
We're certainly not trying to encourage this, but repeated abuse means that over time, these carts are no longer fit for customer use. We have a few customers who buy back these 'abused' carts, refurbish them, and put them back into circulation. This is where we come in, we're part of the refurbishment program.