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Comment by 988747 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Even Walmart has begun to have “half sized” 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 stuff…

They’re built with two large child seats side by side - the only thing I’ve ever seen come close to competing is the large lumber carts at Menards or similar.

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.

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 it’s abandoned and whisk it away to the restock area. It’s 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.

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.

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.

Never liked carts either. I can fit everything I need in a basket or in my hands. I don’t know why but it gives me very unpleasant feelings thinking about spending an hour at a grocery store with a completely filled cart.

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