In a Canadian town, people’s car fobs have stopped working

There may be only one place in the Northern Hemisphere where people aren’t talking about the cold: Carstairs, Alberta, north of Calgary.

They’ve got a mystery in the town of 4,000. Car fobs — those keychain devices we use to unlock or start our cars — have stopped working near a grocery store.

It’s been happening for weeks near the Westview Co-op grocery store. People park, do their shopping, and then can’t get in their cars or get them to start.

They rush back into the store to buy a battery for the fob, figuring that’s the problem. That’s not the problem.

“It’s just bizarre. People are actually scared to go to the Co-op now because they don’t know if their cars are going to start,” Laura Strate, who works a the dollar store across the street, tells the CBC.

“People start getting on there and saying, ‘OK, I’ve been to the Co-op. Is anyone else having this problem?’ And all of a sudden we have 160 people commenting, ‘Yes, that happened to me last week,’ or ‘That happened to me today,'” Strate said.

“I would say it’s been probably a good month where people have known there is a problem and it’s not just someone that says, ‘Oh, my car doesn’t work at Co-op.'”

Electricians were called in. They couldn’t figure it out. They even shut all the power in the store down to see if that would fix the problem. It didn’t fix the problem.

Fortunately, perhaps, Canada has a Ministry of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development. It’s on the case now.

Townspeople called the Mounties, but they said the mystery isn’t their priority.