Pondering the shopping cart

After the initial psychological hurdle, I thought the shopping cart system at my local Aldi supermarket was a good idea. (For those of you who haven’t shopped there, Aldi charges a refundable 25-cent shopping cart rental.) At first the barrier had been the quarters; I always have pennies on me but pennies do not unleash the shopping carts.

I licked the coin problem by always keeping one or two quarters in my car’s console, but then there was the bag situation: Aldi encourages shoppers to bring their own bags by charging for the ones at the checkout. A stash of paper and plastic bags in my backseat looks messy, so I keep them in my trunk where they’re out of sight—but because they are out of sight, I generally don’t remember them until I’m in the store, and I often have to plunk down a few pennies at the register for the 6-cent bags reserved for people like me. But that’s OK because, as I said, I always have pennies.

I assumed the cart rental policy cut down on the unsightly incidence of men pushing contraband-filled supermarket property down the side of the road, but my husband said if someone wants to steal a cart he won’t not do it for the sake of a 25-cent deposit. That never occurred to me, so I now agree that the tariff is more likely based on knowledge of Homo sapiens’ marginal preference for a quarter over the slight inconvenience of escorting the conveyance from one’s car to the stall.

My husband used to know a guy whose purloined shopping cart was his mobile home. The contents of the basket included toiletries from the Salvation Army, PJs, and a change of clothes (for more formal occasions). There were typically a few food items too, and a plastic sheet that, when pulled taut over the top in inclement weather, sufficed for shelter from the rain.

Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Oklahoma Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain, invented the shopping cart in 1937 while sitting in his office wondering how his customers could transport their groceries to their automobiles. I wonder if this still inspires kids. If it does, government overregulation will take care of that impulse.

It sounds crazy that someone like Goldman actually had to come up with a solution that seems so obvious now. But the Native Americans never thought of inventing the wheel, though they had lots of time, and they continued for centuries dragging their supplies on netting mounted on long poles called “travois.” I feel like I could have invented the wheel. But in more realistic moments I realize that if God had made all men with the gift set He gave me, there would be no technology whatsoever.

The Aldi shopping cart is a kind of shibboleth, dividing humanity into the basic groupings of the prepared and the unprepared, the five wise virgins and the five foolish virgins, introverts and extroverts. Some people rush at you all smiles, holding up a quarter, beaming with pride to spare the new arrival from having to perform the insert-jangle-and-extraction procedure to liberate the cart from the corral. There can be seen in their eyes a kind of camaraderie, as if in participation of a grand and noble relay event. We are all in this together.

The appalling question of shopping cart theft ($800 million a year worldwide) would be a good assignment for the folks at the United Nations, keeping them occupied so they can lay off our climate. Or Hillary Clinton might consider focusing her presidential campaign on shopping-cart consciousness, so as to distract attention from her emails and the failure of Obamacare.

There are probably shopping cart clubs abroad, where aficionados meet to discuss styles and the future of the cart. I won’t be joining one because I’m too busy keeping up with my columns, sometimes scraping the bottom of the barrel to make my quota. Although my sister Lise is still trying to talk me into starting a traffic cone club.