At our co-op’s Annual Meeting last week, someone asked why we don’t have toddler carts for people who have their kids with them when they shop. So I went on Facebook Marketplace and found a used cart in the next town over, and bought it for the store.
It’s been a revelation already. Yesterday a very cute little girl came racing in and went straight for the cart. Her mother said, “We’ve been here three times in the past 36 hours because she’s so excited about that thing.”
The three-year-old son of one of our employees is also over the moon about the cart. We posted a photo of him on our social media and it’s been getting a lot of traction. One commenter said how much she loved going to stores that had mini-carts when she was young.
Our employee’s son grabbed a bag of almond flour and a jar of tomato sauce on his initial pass through the aisles. His mother laughed, “I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to make with that!”
That turned on a light bulb for me.
Self-serve grocery stores were a huge step along the way to making the modern supermarket. It started with Piggly Wiggly’s first store in Memphis in 1916. Gradually it became the norm, although for decades you could still find older-style grocery stores where an employee reached down your selection from a shelf behind the counter.
In Petersham, one of the small towns in the North Quabbin region where I live, the old country store didn’t go self-serve until 1944, when the business changed hands and joined the Red & White chain. The town history noted, “Petersham feels quite metropolitan pushing the self-service ‘go-carts’ around.”
In Petersham in 1944, that would have been the primary response—look at us, sophisticated just like the big-city markets where everybody pushes a cart and chooses their own groceries off the shelves.
But when you think about it, the underlying impulse here is the one that’s clearly motivating the toddlers in our store. “Ooh, look, a bright color, a shiny label, a nice shape.” And then you can just reach out and grab it and put it in your own personal cart.
I’m sure it’s part of the reason that online shopping still uses the metaphor of the shopping cart. It activates something in the kiddie brain that’s still inside our adult brains—the pleasure of just reaching out and taking something that appeals to you, whether you need it or not, maybe without even knowing what it is.
Maybe you have a memory of being dragged along on shopping trips and feeling bored, until you got a cart of your own and could participate in this grown-up ritual, not unlike a small town feeling metropolitan. Suddenly the supermarket is a playground. And that feeling is a huge part of why it’s so hard to let go of our supermarket-centered mode of food provisioning.
There are the cheap prices, too, which I wrote about elsewhere earlier this week. But watching those toddlers zipping around the store with the mini-cart has got me thinking that the way supermarkets cater to that just-reach-out-and-take-it impulse may well be the more powerful factor.
There’s another cart not too far away on Facebook Marketplace and I’m going to pick it up this afternoon. We do what we need to do to keep this little store operating. But the cuteness now seems more complicated to me, another reminder of how deep our shopping behaviors go and how hard it is to see and undo them even when we try.
