I wonder if there is actually evidence that people buy more with a cart vs hand held basket, overall. Obviously they likely do for that trip. It seems to me that if I only use a hand held basket, I'm making more trips to the store for my family of 4. Probably daily if not every other day. If I use a cart and purchase a lot, I go to the store less. But, did I actually purchase more or less food in a months duration? I'd bet it's about the same. It's not like I'm literally eating more depending on the method of procurement. I eat about the same, every day. But I would be spending more time standing in lines and wasting more gas by using a basket unless the market was within walking distance and I chose to walk over drive. Personally I don't really like going to shop for anything and buy as much as I can, whether it's food or clothes or anything else.
It seems proximity to the store and the number of people you're routinely buying food for would be the bigger predictors of who would use a cart over a basket, as well as lifestyle. I mean, some people choose to drive even if they live next door to the market.
Maybe it boosts sales of non-food items.
If your hand cart gets full of groceries, you might not pick up other stuff on that trip, like light bulbs, ballpoint pens, a potted plant, or a toy for your kid.
After you've left the grocery store, you still need those things. So you go to the hardware store, office supply store, nursery, or toy store because that's where you prefer to buy that stuff if you're making a separate trip anyway.
Grocery stores get those purchases because of convenience. Take away the convenience and they might lose the purchases.
This is it.
I walk to the grocery store and used to use a basket, carrying food home. Non-food was delivered by Amazon.
Then near the end of 2020 when so many trips per week was getting to be too much a hassle, I bought a personal cart that I bring to the store with me. Now Amazon is more of a hassle for plenty of non-food items, because it's so trivial to add it to the cart, so I've been getting less online and more from the store.
People probably consume about the same, but their other trips could be to different stores. You want someone to do all their shopping in your store!
If there's really no competition nearby, you won't be the first to invest in new technology like shopping carts.
It seems more natural that people would buy more stuff since now they can carry more stuff. It's impractical to carry as many normal shopping carts items, due to their weight, in a hand basket. One needs only a trip to Costco (wholesale bulk purchase store in the US) to see the average shopping cart
I feel like people wouldn't buy as much liquids (soda etc.) without a shopping cart. Tea, coffee, cocoa powder are all small and light in comparison, and milk was delivered.
One big trip is less overhead for the store, so if you consume the same amount, itâs better for the store that you only come once.
Not to mention that if you have a big trolley, youâre going to fill it and buy more, whether you need it or not
> If I use a cart and purchase a lot, I go to the store less.
Even that is already a win for the store â you're spending the same amount money in total, while spending less of cashier's time and other store's resources.
I personally still prefer a shopping basket to a shopping cart, it âallowsâ me to buy less stuff, so less money spent. Itâs also nice that with less stuff bought you can take the tram or even take a walk on your way home afterwards, no need for a car-ride.
Do you not cook for yourself very frequently? Are you single or just don't have kids?
I seriously don't see how people who cook frequently for more than just 1 person get by without a cart without considerable inconvenience.
Like other people have said, I shop on a daily basis, thereâs a store close to us which is open every day and the price difference compared to other, bigger stores which are located just outside the city is not that big. Itâs me, my SO, our dog and our cat, itâs pretty doable, fresh produce and fresh fruits every day (especially now, as the summer comes) is pure heaven.
Weâre not big meat nor processed food consumers, and ordering take-out food is oftentimes comparable (if you add in the opportunity cost of the time and energy spent cooking).
Exactly.
There are 4 grocery stores in easy walking distance to me, and a few more within a 10 min drive. There are also over a dozen specialty markets in that same radius. And a weekly farmers market about a 10 min walk away.
I go food shopping ~3 times a week and just pick up what we need for the next couple of days.
Do you live in SF? If so, I'm curious what neighborhood.
> ordering take-out food is oftentimes comparable
I find people who do the daily shopping thing tend to order more take out than people who do the bulk shopping thing. it might have to do with them skewing younger though
There are so many grocery delivery or pick-up options these days (depends on where you live), I find it surprising people don't prefer those. For most people, I would expect that shopping is somewhat of a boring and tiresome chore.
Big box stores are different. I guess the prices on Amazon are now significantly higher and delivery is taking longer these days, to make the trip to a trip to a Walmart or Target. Still I don't understand how some people's eyes light up as they push around shopping carts.
It just shows me how much I don't understand other people's lives. And a reason to be even more polite when interacting with strangers.
> ordering take-out food is oftentimes comparable
If you account for it objectively, no way.
I'm lazy and often do takeout, but it's definitely much more expensive. A $20 takeout meal can be done for less than $5 by cooking it all at home.
You just shop on a daily basis. ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
I did this for a few months right after work, which was in walking range. Eventually I went back to "shopping big" once every week after I moved and switched my employer, though. But it's doable.
ah yes, the considerable inconvenience part of my comment.
e: I know that a lot of people do this (often because they don't own cars), but having lived in cities my whole life and done both approaches at various times, the infrequent large shipping trip is much faster when amortized over two weeks.
and for those saying all my produce is going to be spoiled or I must just be eating processed foods... absolutely not.
I used to shop on a daily basis. Lately, though, I cannot know that food I want will be available on a daily basis, so I buy in bulk when it is available. This week diet soda is not on the shelves, but at least jumbo eggs are, and thatâs rare. I only have this problem on the west coast, so I suspect itâs a local distribution issue; Iâm looking forward to moving back to the east coast, where groceries are more plentiful.
> You just shop on a daily basis. ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
Maybe you walk to the shops if they are close enough?
If not, that sounds wasteful.
Personally I try to spend as little time in the store as possible, so when I am in there I'll take extra of whatever keeps just so that I don't have to be in the store again any time soon. Better to spend an extra 5m grabbing everything for the next week than to come in again in two days time.
that seems horribly inefficient considering wasted time on the way to/from shop and time spent in queue waiting at checkout, so instead of doing this 1-2x a week you spend like 3 times more time on these fixed items and let's ignore the promotions especially for bigger packages/bulk purchases
I don't think it's really doable unless you are single and you have big chain right on the way from work, otherwise small shops in convenient location next to your house will charge you premium compared to big discount chains
I do the same and I have 2 kids.
Not using a cart allows you to gauge the weight of everthing and it is especially useful if you walk or cycle to the supermarket. Now I am working from home so I just go several times a week, I definitely don't mind doing that as the first thing I want to do when I stop working is having a walk or a bicycle ride outside. Before I used to do that when commuting back home.
Because urban planning in North America is totally broken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk
Sorry, but there is no world in which shopping at the grocer every day is more convenient than shopping once every 1.5 or even 2 weeks or so.
I live in a dense city and very close to grocery stores, this is still true.
Exactly. I'd have to make a giant stroad-y detour to/from the office to go to the grocery store. Even if gas wasn't $5 / gallon, the time sink isn't worth it
People used to use carts that looked like this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Milwaukee-Heavy-Duty-Steel-Shopp... though perhaps not as heavy duty.
Quite capable of bringing home a weekâs worth of groceries in one go.
If you live within walking distance of a store and donât like shopping daily, buying your own cart (of a different style/color than the storeâs) can be a great deal.
Your link is not working but I think you meant this?
https://images.thdstatic.com/productImages/e1f8af99-7af9-45e...
https://946e583539399c301dc7-100ffa5b52865b8ec92e09e9de9f4d0...
They did; your first link is the exact same product image.
Access denied
And what about when you're buying a 28-lb box of kitty litter, or a 30-lb bag of kibble?
Or, heck, even just a gallon of milk?
That basket gets pretty heavy pretty fast, depending on what you're buying.
Some stores like Target and CVS have wheelie baskets now. They look like this[1] or this[2] and you can use them either handheld or roll-along but Iâll admit theyâre a bit cumbersome to carry. For me, at least. Maybe theyâre the perfect size for bigger/taller people.
[1]https://thefixturezone.com/shopping-basket-on-wheels-with-pu...
[2]http://m.thai.groceryshoppingtrolley.com/sale-3255999-colorf...
Several years ago stores in my area deployed the wheeled baskets but I seldom saw people use them. They have almost completely disappeared and been replaced with double tiered small basket shopping carts. If available this is my preferred cart of choice. I shop for 1 1/2 people so these small carts are able to hold a week's worth of my groceries.
I find the wheeled basket that you move like a carry-on the best option; small so you don't buy a lot of stuff, nimble (can get around shopping carts) but don't have to strain your arm and hand after you put a gallon of milk.
It's interesting that shopping carts that you have to insert a coin into still seem to be uncommon in the US. They were the obvious way to incentivise people to bring the carts back in Germany.
(And not necessarily the same people who shopped with them. People who find an abandoned shopping cart in the parking lot would often bring it back to the store to get at the coin.)
Relying on the honor system may be less effective, but I prefer it anyway because it feels a whole lot less demeaning. No quarter is essentially the store saying 'We trust you to do the right thing' whereas the quarter says 'betcha we can make you behave with a quarter'
Also, stray shopping carts left in the lot really doesn't seem like a big problem worth solving to me. The lots all have cart returns scattered throughout them, so you're never very far from one, and the vast majority of people use them.
During the pandemic many stores in Germany left all the carts unlocked and it seems that some of them didn't go back to the old system. So probably they've realized it's a silly thing to do and maybe it actually bring more customers if you left the carts unlocked. I actually used to chose stores that don't require a coin to unlock the carts.
I prefer the pragmatic approach of assuming (not without evidence) that people won't behave without incentive. I'm much more annoyed by carts all over the parking lot than I am by temporarily putting a coin in a slot. And I like the happy side effect of not seeing miserable teenagers in vests tasked with collecting rogue carts on cold nights.
Why does the teenager have that job, and would the teenager be happier without a job?
Besides teenagers, grocery stores often hire mentally impaired people for bagging and cart wrangling. They seem to enjoy the work more than the teenagers.
Exactly this. Also, for example, no security cameras at Trader Joe's and no scales in the self checkout at Whole Foods. I'm a grownup, you don't need forcing functions to make me behave like one.
Note that in just about any store here that uses coin operated carts you can go to the service desk and ask for a coin for the cart and get it. It's really not about the money, though I see how it can feel like it is.
I figure the coin is really just mostly there as a signifier that it's your job to return the cart and not some store employees job.
US doesn't have high enough denomination coins to make it work I imagine.
It works at Aldi in the US. The incentive is not so much that I canât afford throwing away 25 cents, but itâs that, the next time I shop at Aldi, I need a quarter to get a cart.
Yes. But: the quarter doesn't have to work on you. It just has to work on someone.
Ie you can essentially contract out bringing the cart back for a quarter of a dollar.
How many people even have coins in their car anymore, much less in their pocket? I have a small supply of coins in my car just in case but I imagine a lot of people haven't touched a coin or bill in years.
I, and a fair few number of people I know, carry a specific cart-coin in their pocket.
Probably because in the US it is not so easy to walk away with a cart and take it any further than the parking lot. It also wouldn't make much sense.
In Germany, you could theoretically walk your cart a few blocks to your home, then leave it on the street.
A lot of places have an invisible perimeter for shopping carts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QKcprQD0zc
Those are fairly new-ish.
We have an Oma in our apartment who brings a cart back periodically, keeps it at the bike rack, and walks it back to the store the next day she goes shopping.
1-2 eur for a cart is not a bad deal.
I saw plenty of supermarkets with carts asking for coin having their cart stolen and abandoned across town. I think it's mainly linked with whether you have juvenile "gangs" fooling around or not
I hate them to this day. They often are not easy to drive, their wheels tend to block, and navigating a supermarket full of people pushing those carts is a nightmare. I switched to doing grocery shopping online because of that.
Even Walmart has begun to have âhalf sizedâ carts which are much more manageable - especially as compared to the double-wide SUVs you find at Costco.
I wonder if someone could correlate shopping cart size to average purchase size.
I always feel so dwarfed when I push a Costco cart. They're massive.
With three kids they are just perfect! Plus who goes to Costco for 5 things, the fun is in the mountain of stuffâŚ
The first time I walked into BJs as an adult, I was hit with a huge wave of dysphoria. The size of the place, the quantity of stuff and just the commercialism was overwhelming in a very visceral way.
I was really surprised to have such strong negative feelings since I have plenty of good memories of shopping there as a kid. It was always a fun place to go since there were usually lots of free food samples.
Theyâre built with two large child seats side by side - the only thing Iâve ever seen come close to competing is the large lumber carts at Menards or similar.
I usually just park a cart in one place in the supermarket and then carry things to it. If a supermarket is big, then just park the cart consecutively on several places.
I can never leave carts unattended, because the store employees think itâs abandoned and whisk it away to the restock area. Itâs happened multiple times to me.
The shopping carts in Europe tend to have all four wheels able to swivel 360°, which makes them vastly easier to maneuver. (We call them "Euro-carts" when we're able to find a place that has them here in the US.)
My understanding is that grocery stores deliberately chose to use inferior carts in order to make them less attractive to steal, or something like that. I would really like to see them re-evaluate that decision.
I find those "Euro-carts" much more difficult to maneuver. In my experience it is difficult to to turn them without any fixed pivot point. They seem to just want to keep going in whatever direction they are going. Maybe I am just an idiot. Is there some sort of trick to controlling them?
For me, the trick is to guide like a mouse, not steer like a car.
The only place around me that has 4x360° wheels is IKEA (i.e. occasional-not-frequent destination), but I prefer them generally to the standard-issue sort.
It really depends a lot on the upkeep. If stores do no upkeep then in no time you end up with carts that all have one wheel clogged with hair and pulling the cart steeply to one side. With regular maintenance you have smooth running carts that don't have any directional bias and are a pleasure to use.
A supermarket local to me had stickers for a while you could grab as a customer and stick on a cart if it had a stuck wheel. They'd then take that cart out for repair. They don't do the stickers anymore, but I figure they just keep on top of keeping the wheels running smoothly nowadays. Haven't had a cart pull to one side in years now.
I don't like them either, but hardware stores and Colruyt (a Belgian supermarket) have four pivoting wheels but also a fixed wheel in the center under the cart, which allows it to turn much more easily. Those are great.
Never liked carts either. I can fit everything I need in a basket or in my hands. I donât know why but it gives me very unpleasant feelings thinking about spending an hour at a grocery store with a completely filled cart.
This comment section is another reason why Hacker News is not like real life :) Shopping carts are wildly popular where I live.
I wonder if shopping carts became popular alongside the rise of the car, thus you were more likely to get a âcars worth of groceries.â Another innovation in the early 20th century was the rise of bare-bones, almost-at-cost grocers outside of town that you had to drive to which during the Great Depression was were people were starting to go more often, instead of the local market.
Today's resistance to self checkout reminds me of the resistance to these shopping carts and before that the resistance to supermarkets ("why do I have to go fetch my purchases myself?" "I miss the conversation with the shopkeeper" were common examples of complaints that have reappeared in the anti-self-checkout complaints).
To be fair in this case, self-service is objectively worse than having the shopkeeper grab everything you want. The popularity of curb-side pickup of your grocery order shows how nice that model used to be, but self-service is more scalable and cheaper. The same is true when it comes to paying. Itâs nicer to have someone else ring you up than you have to learn to do it yourself.
I think a better comparison would be people complaining about frictionless checkout (where you just walk out like Amazon grocery stores) in the same way as shopping carts, which is actually a whole new and better experience but can feel so weird that people feel uncomfortable about it.
(disclaimer: Iâve never actually tried an Amazon Go store but I do avoid self-checkout whenever I have fruits/veggies to check out)
> self-service is objectively worse than having the shopkeeper grab everything you want.
This makes some assumptions.
Off the top of my head:
1) The shopkeeper is always available to grab your purchases without a wait. 2) You already know exactly which products you want, and/or there aren't different versions of products to select between. 3) The shopkeeper is trustworthy enough to get you the actual products you want. 4) You aren't a person that the shopkeeper is going to discriminate against.
There are lots of good reasons to want to pick out your own groceries.
It works significantly better when there isnât any real choice - you have creamy vs chunky peanut butter instead of forty different brands thereof.
Give me whole milk is easier and simpler than âgive me this particular brand of whole milkâ.
I'll add:
⢠You're able to speak loud and clear.
⢠You can speak the same language as the shopkeeper.
Whenever I go get my own groceries, I can buy my lunches in advance for the next week as well if the expiration dates for my usual lunches are long enough. But whenever I've ordered my groceries delivered, I've had to assume that the expiration dates last for about a week.
There's definitely advantages to someone picking out your groceries for you, but also some drawbacks.
> To be fair in this case, self-service is objectively worse than having the shopkeeper grab everything you want.
even this depends on the type of shopper you are. if I'm buying a bunch of pasta, curbside pickup is great, and delivery is even better. but if I'm buying an ny strip, I want to see all the choices and pick the one that looks best. similar for fruits and vegetables, I don't trust the professional shopper to evaluate ripeness on my behalf. some things you just have to do yourself.
Self-checkout machines are simply bad though. All the hoops they make you jump through to prevent theft makes for a terrible experience. Having to put everything on the damn scale, even if it's the only thing you're buying, sucks, and even still it always yells at you, "UNEXPECTED ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA!". And there's always a dozen prompts you have to click through before you can pay.
Home Depot gets it right. They have a large table with a handheld wireless scanner, a receipt printer, a card payment terminal, and a touch screen that you don't need to interact with at all. All you have to do is start scanning and tap your card when you're done.
These days many supermarkets here have self-scan systems where you scan each item yourself with a handheld machine before putting it in your cart or bag, and at checkout you just put the scanner back, scan your store card and pay. Once in a while, a worker has to scan random items from your cart (I assume it's based on heuristics that try to determine whether you might have had a possibly suspicious behavior like cancelling items from the scanner often) but that's quite rare.
It's fast, there are no lines, it's less work for everyone.
Many of the 'self-checkout' machines are really bad at what they do. Put the items on a scale as you scan them, but don't put your own bag on the scale ... so you can bag the item after it's scanned, saving repeating that motion for each item ... or it will bitch at you. Repeatedly. (And the 'watchperson' comes over sounding accusatory.)
The store can damn well afford to pay someone to scan and bag the items, while I do the loyalty-card, payment-card cha-cha. The store isn't paying me to do all this shit.
Do you really find that to be a hurdle? The first time I used one, the scale warning surprised me. But it's trivial to avoid, and now self checkout feels super efficient to me
I'm tall, and the scales are nearly at floor level. And if I walk into a grocery store and buy a single bag of milk (which doesn't need another bag because it is a bag so why would I put it in the bagging area?), having to stoop down to put it on the scale is an inconvenience I'd rather avoid. Some stores let you select "no bag" every time and let you proceed to payment, but most don't. Being treated with so much suspicion is also not pleasant.
My solution is to avoid self-checkout at stores with crappy machines, or avoid those stores altogether. If Home Depot can do good self-checkout, why can't everyone else? That's the primary reason I frequent HD over Lowe's.
It can be a hurdle for people who aren't already familiar with the machines and their arcane rules. That quickly becomes a problem if the store doesn't have enough staff to dedicate an employee to the self-checkout area.
I've been seeing this more often in the past few months at understaffed low-cost retailers. When there's nobody around to override the machines, people get frustrated and move on to the next open machine without understanding what went wrong.
Five minutes later, the entire self-checkout area is offline, and the would-be customer sometimes feels sufficiently annoyed and neglected to walk off with their groceries.
Wal Mart gets it perfect with Wal Mart Pay too.
What is Wal-Mart Pay? In Canada Wal-Mart's self-checkouts are as bad as the rest. Actually, worse, because they force you to walk through this longaze before you can even get to the machines.
I like talking to people in the checkout line. The lady who checked me out today grew up in the same tiny town my parents retired to, 7 hours from here. Just learned that today. Plus, the UX of self checkout systems generally sucks to the extent that it makes me angry when I use it, and I'd rather feel better at the end of a transaction than worse.
People like you are my worst nightmare :P. The last thing I want when shopping is interactions with random strangers. I'll even gladly take a slightly janky self-checkout experience if it eliminates interacting with a cashier.
In cities you often see these smaller two-level shopping carts[1]. They're better than a basket and take less space (and are much more efficient with space) than a normal shopping cart.
[1] They look like this https://www.amazon.com/Two-Tier-Shopping-Cart-300/dp/B076F9Z...
Not a fan of shopping carts in general. But what I really can't stand is when I go to a store and they have more large carts than could ever possibly fit in the store at once, yet very few of the small carts, and usually no baskets. I imagine this is to entice you to use a large cart -> buy more shit.
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