The television advertisements for Asda extol the virtues of shopping with the supermarket chain for competitively priced household items. They feature people – celebrities, employees and customers alike – patting their back pockets and exclaiming with a cheery smile: "That's Asda price!" Well, someone has taken their ethos to heart and decided to do some saving of their own – by nicking 800 trolleys in less than a fortnight. At £80 a pop, the £64,000 question is, who would steal them?
The trolleys were taken over 12 days from the company's Eastgate shopping centre branch in Basildon, Essex. All were fitted with a slot for the refundable £1 coin deposit (a scheme to encourage customers to return them to their correct collection points) but these were disregarded – it is suspected that the thieves simply chopped through the chains holding them together. Sadly, there's no CCTV to help solve the mystery, as the trolleys were taken from the unmonitored car-park bays.
What will the thieves be hoping to do with their enormous haul? Perhaps it is destined for the sculpture park. Or, forgive the reference to The Wire, but one can't help but picture Bubbles the heroin addict stealing and selling copper to metal scrapyards for his next hit. But these trolleys are stainless steel and Simon Nickson, managing director of Formbar, a company that supplies shop equipment to independent groups including Costcutter and Spar, believes it wouldn't be worth it.
"You're not going to get a vast amount of money for scrap – probably only about £5 to £7 a trolley – which is hardly worth stealing," he says. "With that sort of quantity, I'm just wondering whether they're buying to sell to third-world countries, second-hand. They may have a customer in Asia or Europe who might give them 25 quid each for them."
