They Stole A Big Y Cart And Spray Painted It Blue?

Walking down Valentine Road in Pittsfield, you'll spot an unusual sight: two Big Y shopping carts abandoned on the roadside. One is the regular full-size cart. The other? Someone's custom job – a smaller cart completely spray-painted blue.

That's right. Someone didn't just steal a shopping cart from Big Y. They took the time and effort to spray paint it blue. All of it.

When asked about cart theft, a Big Y representative said there hasn't been an uptick – it's "no more than usual." The store has a system in place: "We see them ourselves sometimes, or people tell us where they are and our guys go and grab them," she explained.

But here's what makes the blue cart fascinating: the effort involved. Stealing a shopping cart because you need to haul groceries home – that's lazy, sure, but understandable. Spray painting it? That suggests ownership. Pride, even. This isn't just a borrowed cart. This is someone's cart now. Or - I don't know - because if it was "someone's" - it's surely out in the open.

Each shopping cart costs retailers between $75 and $150 to replace, and those losses get built into prices everyone pays. Big Y loses carts regularly to theft – they end up in creeks, woods, apartment complexes, and apparently, spray-painted on Valentine Road.

But most stolen carts are simply abandoned once they've served their purpose. Not this one. This one got a makeover. You have to wonder: Why blue? Is this someone's prized possession for collecting returnables? Did they consider other colors, or was blue always the vision?