Visible First

An Exposure-Weighted Dispatch Service for Stray Supermarket Trolleys

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities describes an eighteen-week deployment of a dispatch service that ranks each reported stray supermarket trolley by an estimate of how readily it is seen from the arterial road network, discounted by estimated retrieval cost, across a twenty-one-store retail network handling 9,412 reports from four depots. Exposure-weighted median time to collection fell from 58.4 hours to 9.0 hours and improved at every depot, while across all reports the ninetieth percentile rose from 96 hours to 412 hours and the share still open at study close rose from 0.4% to 6.1%, entirely within laneway and drainage-reserve frontages; an ablation removing the sightline prior from the exposure weight produced no detectable change in any headline measure.

@misc{slop_6jcj2m,
  author       = {Verity Marris and Torun Ezeigwe and Iben Chikere},
  title        = {Visible First: An Exposure-Weighted Dispatch Service for Stray Supermarket Trolleys},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.6jcj2m},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-ranking-stray-supermarket-6jcj2m/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}