This weekend, this DCist was doing a bunch of shopping in Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland to gather essentials for our new apartment. While our adventures in suburban shopping may seem silly to our readers in D.C.’s exurban areas, we feel that we must note something very important: Shoppers Food Warehouse discriminates against single people.

What are we talking about? For those who head to Potomac Yard to stock up on essential goods, you may be familiar with Shopper’s policy about taking carts into the parking lot. In fact, the store’s carts are equipped with devices that will lock up the wheels if you attempt to push your cart to your car. A bilingual sign says that that the carts will lock up if you take it past the parking lot, but as we found out, the front curb is as far as you can go.

Apparently, Shoppers says that it has attentive store representatives stationed by the curb to watch your cart as you retrieve your car. But these representatives were not around. So we had to leave our cart on the curb so we could get the car. Frustrating, yes.

Do you know of other big box stores with similar shopping cart policies? Are shopping carts really facing a serious threat? And if you really wanted to steal one, wouldn’t the busy Jefferson Davis Highway that cuts the strip-mall complex off from the rest of the world serve as a deterrent?

>> Crescent Resources on Potomac Yard, aka “The Green City,” development.