( CNN ) -- The year was 1937 . It was the dawn of the soft-drink machine , the first tube of the Lincoln Tunnel ... and the shopping cart . Inventor Sylvan Goldman 's prototype for the shopping cart was nothing more than two wire baskets attached to a folding chair , but it was the start of what would become a supermarket staple . When it first came on the scene , customers were reluctant to use the cart . But by the 1960s , they were so ubiquitous that a new problem had arisen : . The rogue shopping cart . Chicago supermarket owner Anthony Dinolfo was so enraged by the volume of stolen shopping carts popping up in places decidedly not supermarkets ( in auto repair shops , people 's basements and at the bottom of rivers ) that he went on a crusade to return them to their rightful owners . In 1969 , he deemed February Return Shopping Carts to the Supermarket Month . Dinolfo died in 2009 , but his crusade reappears each February on various websites and Internet forums , and was even acknowledged by the U.S. Census Bureau . When we brought this to the attention of the CNN iReport community , our contributors mentioned that until now , they had never noticed how prevalent wayward shopping carts were . While it may be easy to write off Dinolfo 's crusade as just the hysterical rant of a disgruntled business owner , retailers report cart theft to be a costly problem . Shopping carts cost anywhere from $ 75 to $ 150 each , according to Brett Osterfeld of Gatekeeper systems . Retailers find customers ' ambivalence toward the issue frustrating , but most people ca n't help but think that there are greater causes to raise awareness about . `` Am I supposed to really feel sorry for the grocers ? '' asked Jeremy Nix from Denver . The great cart robbery . Ron Fong , president and CEO of the California Grocers Association , found that stores that report the greatest losses are located in neighborhoods and cities where few people own a car , but still need an efficient way to carry their groceries home . Once the shoppers are finished , the carts rarely return to the store . Fong said that he 's seen many innovative uses for shopping carts , such as portable barbecue grills , lounge chairs and even shelters . He noted that many homeless people use them to transport their belongings . In November , Hawaii state lawmaker Tom Brower attempted to clean up the state 's homeless problem by taking a sledgehammer to abandoned shopping carts . Hawaii has the country 's highest rate of homeless per capita ; Brewer said his solution was meant to encourage them to seek out shelters . `` I get a lot of complaints about stolen and abandoned shopping carts in Waikiki , and I was thinking as a public servant , 'What can I do that would be practical and I can literally do overnight ? ' `` Brower told CNN affiliate KITV . `` I 'm not doing anything different than doing a community cleanup , or what the city 's administration has tried to do with the issue of people illegally camping on the streets . '' Supermarkets and community members are n't the only ones upset about the stray carts . The city of Santa Ana , California , reported an annual cost of $ 50,000 to retrieve abandoned shopping carts from local streams and rivers . Across the country , John Long , president of the Maryland nonprofit Clean Bread and Cheese Creek , said that volunteers have removed more than 200 shopping carts from the creek that drains into the Chesapeake Bay since 2009 . `` They create an environmental hazard by trapping wildlife and causing artificial dams along the stream , which lead to flooding and erosion , '' Long said . Stores are working to contain the problem through the use of cart containment systems -- the wheels lock when they reach the boundary of the store 's parking lot -- and by hiring companies to locate and return the carts for a fee . And yet , it 's not hard to find plenty of shopping carts in the wild ... Scroll through the gallery to see some of the spots where carts have turned up .
February is Return Shopping Carts to the Supermarket ##s . Rogue shopping carts have been used such as grills , toilets and shelters . Stores report annual losses of more than $ 100 million globally due to cart ##ing . Stores enlist sophisticated security systems in order to contain the problem .