The announcement of the cancellation of the pilot project was made on Thursday. Target spokeswoman Kristy Welker said shoppers are “the centre of everything we do” and noted there was a lot of feedback about the mini carts introduced to allow children in the store to have fun. Target received a lot of feedback concerning these kiddie carts and the negative outweighed the positive.
Target had these mini carts in 10 stores for more than a year. In August, the pilot project was expanded to 72 stores; 50 in the company’s home state of Minnesota and 10 in New York. While some of Target’s customers liked the carts, many more did not.
Complaints, many of them made on social media, told about having their legs and ankles bruised by children hitting them with carts and kids running around the store with them. A video posted on Twitter shows a little girl with a cart continually ramming her cart into the legs of a woman, presumably her mother.
The wide aisles in Target stores gave the children plenty of room to run wild with these carts. Parents also complained of children filling up their carts with items they had no intention of purchasing. Shoppers without children were not impressed with the carts either.
Employees also complained the carts were cluttering the stores.
A social media post that got a lot of attention came from a Minnesota mommy blogger, Laura Rinas. Rinas posted that when she first saw the carts she thought they might be fun. That lasted for about 10 seconds. Then she saw her son go wild with his cart. He crashed it into other carts because he liked the sound it made. And he put lots of items in his cart she had no intention of buying.
Rinas called these carts “vehicles of mass destruction” and jokingly announced she was starting a group MASTC (Moms Against Stupid Tiny Carts). Rinas had only been blogging for a short time and her posts had only been viewed by family and friends. But the humorous post about MASTC went viral. It has been viewed well over 200,000 times.
Target was not the first company to have children’s carts in their stores. Joe Trader’s, Lunds and Fresh Thyme also have them.
