Thu 6 Oct 2005
It was four months living here before I made it into the grocery store with a shopping cart. The first problem was remembering that the cart pickup was near the car out in the parking lot, not near the shopping mall door. The second problem was leaving the house with the right coins to get a cart.
See the yellow circle highlight in the picture? That is the coin deposit device, and it ensures you are motivated to return the cart to the corral. This is brilliant! Why pay some kid minimum wage to shlep all the carts back into place? Let everyone put their own carts back. Enterprising panhandlers will often do it for you, too.
Unfortunately, those little devices consumed all the brilliance of this cart’s designer. By the time he got to the wheels, all his good ideas had vanished. Indeed, even his basic logic was gone.
All four wheels rotate on these things, rendering them nearly impossible to control. If you find yourself shopping with slippery shoes or high heels, (I have never found myself shopping with high heels, but I have heard it happens) your back will do all the work instead. At the end of the check-out process, the only thing you want to do is go home, lie down, and remember your tennis shoes next time.
There is another cultural norm here that involves shopping carts, too. Rather than push these things wherever people go in the store, they leave their cart at the head of the aisle and fill it up from there. That way the Zamboni machines have to dodge their cart, and not the other way around!
October 7th, 2005 at 10:41 am
Next, could you analyse( that is your favorite word! you are gonna LOVE this and think about this one for at least 10 min and get nothing else done! hee hee!) ..the physics of why my case of boxed shelf milk and other heavy items need to be placed toward the driver(back) of the cart. When placed at the front, it is almost impossible to control!
October 7th, 2005 at 12:50 pm
I’m one step ahead of you on that already, Valerie. Last night I observed the same thing; loaded the crate of milk, and then I could hardly steer it anymore. I figure it is because there is more weight on one (or both) of the front wheels, thus creating more friction within the rotating part of the wheel, thus making it harder for the wheel to turn, thus making it harder to control the cart.
That only took about one minute.