✨ Resident Life

First, here's a description of a nice, convenient scenario for apartment dwellers: a few shopping carts and a hotel-style wheeled garment cart are kept in a storeroom just inside the building entrance. Residents can use these carts to bring in their groceries or take seasonal items to the storage bin area, etc. Also in this storage room: a wheelchair in case it's ever needed. There is a sign and an understanding that one needs to immediately return the carts to this storage room when the resident is finished. Someone has noticed that sometimes additional wheelchairs appear that seem to have no owner.

Problem: the carts and the chairs are either left out in the lobby (unsightly) or, there are lousy, willy-nilly attempts to put them in the storeroom.... often by shoving a cart in without careful nesting or putting a chair inside without folding it up. I guess someone has developed the knack of barely getting the cart into the willy-nilly nest and then quickly closing the door before the device tries to roll back out. Result: difficulty for the next person to even open the door. (I'll ask Facilities if they can change the door direction to "out" rather than "in.")

A conscientious resident tries to "fix" things by re-doing the mess so that it's orderly, but patience is running thin.

Have any of you had this problem and came up with a solution? Our Facility management has been notified, but I honestly don't know how much inter-community "best practices" have been shared between our managements. Maybe we residents can show them how we learn from each other; hence, this email to this google group.

Thanks very much for any responses. 

JY of The Village at Brookwood, Burlington NC

We have hotel-style carts available to residents. We used to have other kinds of carts as well, but they have long since disappeared (my speculation is that staff used them a lot so now keep them in a staff area, but I don't really know). We've never had shopping carts. The carts are in the garages of the two buildings, with signage about returning them promptly. It all depends on an honor system and does not appear to be monitored. Months ago, one labeled for one building appeared in the other building. Residents of the building where it belonged complained, but the cart is still in the wrong building. It would have been possible for a resident of that building to just roll it to the other building, but that hasn't been done.

We do usually have wheelchairs available which are kept behind a concierge desk.

Bill Samuel

Ingleside at King Farm, Rockville, Maryland

At Medford Leas in Medford, New Jersey (a CCRC) the Maintenance department controls the “carts”. They are usually kept near the shipping dock and are readily available to residents.