Shopping cart
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image:Colourful shopping carts.jpgA shopping cart (also called a buggy or a trolley in British English; sometimes referred to as a carriage or shopping carriage in the U.S. region of New England; also known as a bascart in some regions of the U.S. and basket in others.) is a cart supplied by a shop, especially a supermarket, for use by customers inside the shop for transport of merchandise to the check-out counter, and, after paying, often also to the car on the parking lot. Often, customers are allowed to leave the carts in the parking lot, and store personnel return the carts to the shop.
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[edit] Design
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Most shopping carts are made of metal or plastic and designed to nest within each other in a line to facilitate moving many at one time, and to save on storage space. The carts can come in many sizes, with larger ones able to carry a child. There are also specialized carts designed for two children, and electric mobility scooters with baskets designed for disabled customers. 20,000 children are injured each year in shopping carts. Some stores have child carts that look like a car or van where a child can sit in the seat while shopping. Such "Car-Carts" or "Beans", as some people call them in the cart business, may offer added protection for children by keeping child restrained, lower to the ground as well as protected from falling items while they are kept amused.
Shopping carts are fitted with four caster wheels, which can point in any direction to allow "easy" maneuvering. However, when any one of the wheels jams, the cart becomes extremely difficult to handle. Note that some carts only have swivel caster wheels on the front, while the rear ones are locked. This presumably improves the steering life of the cart, at the expense of maneuverability.
An alternative to the shopping cart is a small handheld shopping basket. A customer can often choose between a cart and a basket, and may prefer a basket if the amount of merchandise is small. Small shops, where carts would be impractical, often supply only baskets. A third options is a collapsible utility cart. The basket of the collapsible utility cart is pivotally mounted to a forward facing, C-shaped cart frame. As the lower portion of the C-shaped cart frame is moved under a truck bed, the upper part containing the basket slides onto the truck bed. The frame is then pivoted upward around the truck bumper and about the basket and conveniently stored around the basket. U.S. Patent No. 5,503,424 details this invention.
Often there is the problem of theft of shopping carts by pedestrian customers who use them to carry groceries all the way home. Many end up in rivers. Shopping carts cost on average between $75 and $100 apiece in the United States.[citation needed] One solution is to set up an electric perimeter around the parking lot.
[edit] History
The first shopping cart was introduced on June 4, 1937, the invention of Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Piggly-Wiggly supermarket chain in Oklahoma City. With the assistance of Fred Young, a mechanic, Goldman constructed the first shopping cart, basing his design on that of a wooden folding chair. They built it with a metal frame and added wheels and wire baskets, and advertised the invention as part of a new “No Basket Carrying Plan.”
The invention did not catch on immediately. Men found them effeminate; women found them suggestive of a baby carriage. "I've pushed my last baby buggy," offended women informed him. After hiring several male and female models to push his new invention around his store and demonstrate their utility, as well as greeters to explain their use, shopping carts became extremely popular and Goldman became a multimillionaire. Goldman continued to make modifications to his original design, and the basket size of the shopping cart increased as stores realized that their customers purchased more as its size increased. Today, most big-box stores and supermarkets have shopping carts for the convenience of the shoppers.
[edit] Rental
Sometimes the customer has to pay a small deposit by inserting a coin, which is returned if and when the customer returns the cart to a designated cart parking point. Some retailers sell "trolley tokens" as an alternative to coins, often for charity. The mechanism can often be unlocked by inserting a key into the slot to open the lock.
This is also done for profit with luggage carts at many airports, where companies like Smarte Carte charge two or more dollars (U.S.) (or equivalent) for rental, and return a small token reward of a quarter (25 ¢) for returning carts to the other end of any dispenser machine.
[edit] Electronic theft prevention
Image:Shopping Trolley Esperance Tanker Jetty.jpgImage:DSCN1235.JPG As shopping cart losses reach 180 million dollars a year in the U.S. and more municipalities pass abandoned shopping cart legislation, shopping cart containment systems are proving to be a viable cost effective solution. Shopping carts average $50.00 to $80.00 apiece depending on quantity and materials used in their construction. Shopping carts are frequently removed from store premises by patrons without the knowledge or permission of the shopping cart’s owner which is typically a retail food store. These wayward shopping carts are more likely to never be returned by the patron and have to be recovered by paid contracted shopping cart retrieval companies. Shopping carts that are not promptly removed from public and private property other than a retail store property may be confiscated as provided by local or other statutes and held for redemption by municipalities. Some states however do not recognize carts left on private property as abandoned even though the property may not be that of the retailer, further hampering retrieval efforts. Often the municipalities that perform their own shopping cart confiscation roundups and storage thereof do not always promptly or ever contact the respective owners of the seized cart inventories preventing the timely return of the much needed shopping carts. To further exacerbate this situation, some shopping cart retrieval service providers have been known to retrieve shopping carts from their own client retailer’s property and then charge the same retailer for their own on premises carts as if they were actually off premises and missing.
Some missing shopping carts never make it back to their original owners due to theft and resale to other retailers with or without the knowledge of the purchasing party. Smaller independent retailers as an almost accepted way of conducting business resort to scavenging shopping cart inventories from surrounding areas and from each other without regard to who might own the shopping carts due to the costs associated with maintaining their own fleets.
Larger retailers that maintain more than one operation in relatively close proximity often lose and gain inventories between themselves creating imbalances of deployable shopping cart inventories. This wreaks havoc on the industry’s ability to maintain any resemblance of control, custody and maintenance of their shopping carts often forcing retailers to purchase carts in a panic during periods of depleted inventories only to later be overwhelmed with excess inventories when the missing carts arrive at any point in time thereafter. Typically the non-warehouse retail store operates on a 1% average profit margin. Many chains have elected to close high loss stores just because of runaway shrinkage from carts and merchandise. Others often remain in high loss areas regardless of running in the red just to maintain a presence in their respective communities.
Shopping cart loss according to the Food Marketing Institute "FMI" costs U.S. retailers over 180 million dollars a year which is passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. To address this staggering loss many an inventor including myself have concocted dozens of shopping cart security technologies over the years with only a small fraction capable of enduring the harsh operating environment of the common retail store.
The first successful shopping cart immobilization system was introduced in 1996 at a Lucky's store in Costa Mesa California. This design was and remains an "all in wheel" configuration with no external parts. The product was trademarked "The Wheel" and several patents later is in use all over the world.
A follow up product to the wheel was introduced later that year by Carttronics now headquartered in Carlsbad California and was introduced almost side by side in neighboring booths with the "Wheel" at that year's FMI trade show in Chicago. The Carttronics design was and remains a castor with a spring loaded high impact plastic scoop like cover that rotates around and over the caster and once the scoop reaches its end of travel it inhibits cart movement by friction. This design was born of market intelligence conducted by Carttronics during a time when the "Wheel" experienced flat spotting on its locking castor when it was in early stages of beta testing. To address what appeared to be an unsolvable dilemma at first glance, Carttronics went to work on an alternative approach not subject to flat spotting. Subsequently within a month the "Wheel"s flat spotting was remedied and now there were two companies vying for market share. The "Wheel" was sold to "Gatekeeper Systems" in Irvine California in 1998/99. Market dominance is nearly split equally between Carttronics and Gatekeeper with one or the other taking the lead at any given time. Both the Carttronics and Gatekeeper devices operate on each other's systems sharing the same wireless VLF command structure permitting partial or complete retrofit to one locking castor or the other without any hardware changes.
These systems work by immobilizing one or more of the shopping cart's wheels when the cart is taken out of an authorized area of operation typically a retailer's parking lot. Each shopping cart is fitted with one or more electronic locking wheels. The shopping cart is secured by means of an on board receiver that detects and decodes a digitally broadcasted AM signal more specifically a OOK or "On-Off-Keyed" modulated signal that emanates from a perimeter encompassing transmission line. To avoid FCC certification of intentional radiators the carrier frequency is just under nine kilohertz. Modulation of the OOK carrier is modulated in such a way as to mitigate spurious radiation or harmonics. The perimeter wire usually consists of 14 gauge traffic signal wire and is placed into a one inch deep saw cut trough about a quarter inch wide. Tar-like filler is then poured into the saw cut over the wire to protect it from weather and vandals. The VLF "Very low frequency" carrier emitted from the perimeter wire can be adjusted for range or "capture area" at the loop driver which is simply a modulated amplifier. The onboard receiver consists of a micro power front end circuit consisting of a resonant tank circuit and a detector. The entire circuit draws just a few microamps of current until it performs a "lock" or "Unlock" function which draws several milliamps for a brief period of time. The power source is usually a 3.2 volt lithium photo battery or 9V cell. To unlock or reset the locked caster or wheel the cart must be manually moved away from the perimeter wire's field of influence enough to permit a much lower powered hand held remote to reset and free the secured wheel. To alert store patrons of the security system, multi-lingual signage and sometimes a yellow line or pattern is painted near the buried perimeter wire to warn customers that their cart will stop if they attempt to travel beyond that point. To prevent circumvention of the security device by simply tilting the cart to favor the remaining unsecured wheels, an anti-tilt bar is often deployed. This device acts as a frictional brake and makes it nearly impossible to overcome.
Other less popular models used rather unconventional means to disable a shopping cart. One such device causes one or more of the front wheels to lock in a turning position limiting travel to a radius established by the locking angle. If the cart were travelling at bove normal speeds such a forced turning radius could cause the cart to tip over ptentially injuring the patron or a child in the cart's seat. Another model by Mind quirx LLC slowly collapses the entire front end of the cart to the point where the front casters can't function. Although this design is more expensive than the rest of the field it is more reliable and safe as it does not succumb to tip over upon or after lockup.
One short lived locking shopping cart castor from the mid 90's by a company called Polytracker utilized a distance counter that would cause the castor to lock when it reached a site survey determined distance. This castor would receive a "Start counting" signal at the retailer's exit and when the count reached the preset distance the castor would lock. Unfortunately the designers of this device failed to consider the countless routes one can take when leaving a parking lot and just hoped the cart would not immobilize in an inconvenient location like a busy intersection or crosswalk.
Other even less effective contraptions have been tried and all over the world. One such model was a castor with a downward extended finger that would catch on a mindfield of strategically placed Lego-like blocks distributed about the perimeter of a retailer’s property. Another attempted solution used a magnetically sensitive lever that would trip when the cart traversed a large mind field of magnets. All the patron had to do was slightly tip the cart back on its rear wheels and off he goes. What no one was prepared for was the daunting task of removing metallic objects like paper clips, key rings, bobby pins, iron ore and other debris that would build up on the array of magnets.
Some retailers even resorted to placing bollards or poles about the store's property to create a physical barrier small enough to trap shopping carts. This practice was soon halted after a landmark American Disabilities case was filed and won against Safeway Stores.
From court documents
[On April 19, 1994, Timothy Fox, Michela Alioto and the Disability Rights Council of Greater Washington, Inc., commenced an action in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against Safeway Inc. ("Safeway"), captioned Fox, et al. v. Safeway, Inc., Civ. No. 94-0878 (NHJ) (D.D.C.) ("the Fox Litigation"). The plaintiffs in the Fox Litigation alleged that at ten Safeway grocery stores in Washington, D.C., Safeway (a) denied equally convenient access to persons with mobility impairments by having in place security bollards with "flag" gates that prevented a number of persons who use wheelchairs from entering or exiting Safeway's stores; and (b) failed to provide adequate, designated accessible parking. The complaint alleged that these deficiencies constituted unlawful discrimination against persons with disabilities under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 12181 et seq. (the "ADA"), and the District of Columbia Human Rights Act, D.C. Code §§ 1-2501 et seq. (the "HRA"), and that Safeway's alleged violation of law caused injuries to the individual and organizational plaintiffs.]
Safeway corrected the violations to the satisfaction of the parties and no further action was taken.
What is on the horizon for a shopping cart near you? The holy grail of shopping cart containment technologies, wireless cart containment. This is just around the corner and will bring shopping cart containment to the small retailer as there will be no expensive saw cutting required.
Another cart related technology on the way is cart mounted shopper guidance and assistance data entry terminals with displays. IBM is working on a system that will "localize" or log position or navigation coordinates of every cart inside the store in near real time. Strategically located beacons will be displaced about the store and communicate with a cart mounted sensor. The patron gets free navigation and IBM gets to sell the data on the shopper's store navigation travels and buying habits. Store slotting fees will be adjusted according to cart navigation patterns.
[edit] See also
- Shopping cart software (e-commerce, not software for physical shopping trolleys)
- Watson Systems
[edit] References
- Ted Morgan, On Becoming American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), pp. 245-6.
[edit] External links
- A history of Sylvian Goldman, inventor of the shopping trolley
- Shopping Cart–Related Injuries to Children American Academy Of Pediatrics
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