Almost every day, right after work, I go to the grocery store. I don’t plan ahead for meals, so I get what I need for dinner that night, plus anything else I may need at home.My shopping habits are not really important for this tale. I share them only to establish the fact that I do shop, quite frequently, so I consider myself an expert in this matter.
As I enter the store to do my shopping, I have several choices for gathering my purchases.
Depending upon how many things I think I need, I may choose a shopping cart, a hand basket, or if I think I’m only getting a couple things, I sometimes just carry them. Using a hand basket, or carrying stuff by hand usually works well, unless I underestimate how many things I need to get. It happens. Like I said, I don’t plan ahead.
But today I have a list, and I know I need to get quite a few things, so on my way past the shopping cart corral, I stop to grab a cart. At least I try to grab one.
I give the handle a couple sharp tugs, and when it reluctantly breaks free from the stack, it is inextricably entangled with another cart. I only need one, so I try to separate them. Struggling, I push and pull in vain until another customer stops to offer his assistance.
We are soon engaged in a futile tug of war. Those two carts will not separate without bringing in heavy equipment. I don’t have the time, or the equipment, so I finally push those two aside and try the next one in the stack. It slid out so effortlessly, I nearly threw my back out expecting that more force would be necessary.
This was not a “What the Hell?” moment. No, I knew exactly what the Hell. It happens all too often. It happens to me, and I’ve seen it happen to you. It’s almost expected.
But why should it happen? Why do they stick together? Shopping carts have been around for a thousand years. You’d think someone could have fixed that!
For 90% of their nearly 2-million-year history, humans were hunters and gatherers. They ate what they could find or catch: fruits; berries; nuts; leaves; fish and other animals. They made baskets from twigs and animal skins to carry their food back to camp. Those baskets, although primitive, were probably very similar to the plastic basket I sometimes use to gather my purchases at the supermarket.
About 10,000 years ago, as agriculture was developing, farmers were able to grow more food than they needed, and they sold the excess in community markets. This was the beginning of civilization, and the shoppers at those markets also used baskets to carry their purchases.
By the 1930s, little stores were growing into bigger stores, and big stores became supermarkets. Larger stores meant more choices, and more potential purchases. But shoppers were still using hand baskets. When the basket was full, or it got too heavy, shoppers would head for the checkout even if they didn’t get everything they wanted.
In 1936, a brilliant grocery store owner created a rolling cart with two baskets that would allow a customer to buy twice as much on a shopping trip. And the wheels made it easy to roll the cart around the store. The carts folded up to save space at the front of the store, and the separate baskets simply stacked. It worked great, and caught on quickly.
Customer convenience was of course only a byproduct of this innovation. The real motivation for the invention was to increase sales…and profits.
Over the next 15 years, there were many variations and improvements to that cart that eventually led to the design we are all familiar with today.
By 1952, the shopping cart had the characteristic shape, the child seat with plastic flap to block leg holes, a colored plastic handle with the store’s name, and a hinged back to allow the carts to nest so they took up less space when stacked at the front of the store. The ultimate cart.
65 years later, there have been virtually no improvements to this ultimate design. You could park a 1952 shopping cart in front of Safeway today, and customers would not know the difference.
Perhaps not surprisingly, in 2017, shopping carts are just as likely to stick together as they were in 1952, over a half-century ago!
Many stores now have carts that are manufactured from sturdy plastic, but they are based on the same flawed design that still allows them to jam together. And when those new plastic carts are intermingled with the steel ones, it can be even harder to separate them.
In 65 years, there have been no advances in design to allow the carts to reliably separate. Nesting carts is a great feature to save space, but if they will not separate, you have conjoined carts that are unusable. And like I did with mine, they are simply pushed aside.
Those outcasts spend the rest of the day just taking up space in the middle of the aisle, continually being pushed aside, this way, then that, until another co-mingled couple joins them on the supermarket dance floor.
Eventually, those two jammed carts may be separated by an enthusiastic customer or employee, only to be pushed right back into the stack. But the reality is, those carts will now have a tendency to do it again. In the culture of stuck shopping carts, it doesn’t matter whether you’re the sticker or the stickee. You’re both now tainted.
There is no rehabilitation for copulating carts. They will seek out the tiny imperfections in other carts and latch on tight. And they will infect the other carts with their disgusting tendencies.
Before you know it, there is a big stack of entangled carts, a chrome-plated orgy, and the whole inseparable mess will have to be shipped away as a unit to be melted down. That pot of molten metal will become the next generation of shopping carts—shiny, new, smooth-rolling, unsullied, each filled with youthful enthusiasm and vigor, but completely clueless to its destiny.
My “thousand years” claim was an exaggeration, of course, borne out of frustration. But well over a half-century is still plenty of time to work out that defect. Nothing else changed. That’s all they had to work on for nearly 7 decades. That one little bug. That one minor flaw.
We are not trying to separate a satellite from its launch vehicle. It’s a shopping cart. Welded wire on wheels.
If I had 65 years with nothing else to do, I could fix that!
Scott Wright © 2017