Growing up, we didn’t have a car in our household until I was fifteen. So how did we get our groceries home from the store? Mom had a two wheeled foldable grocery cart.

These were pretty common back in the day, at least among our economic class, but also the timeframe. Back in the 50s/60s most households only had one car and that was dads for going to and from work. Seeing mothers with small children tagging along in the grocery store was nothing remarkable, nor is it today really. But nowadays you tend to only see older shoppers with these grocery carts, who live in nearby senior housing.

At the store this cart would be folded up and fit under the shopping cart while mom enacted the ancient rite of hunting and gathering among the isles. She (or I usually) would slide it out at the checkout counter, unfold it, and the baggage clerk would helpfully put the bags into it as they came from the register clerk (grocery stores used to have one clerk to work the cash register and another to bag groceries).

Being the “man of the house” my job was to pilot the grocery cart back home. It wasn’t that much of a chore and I happily dove into it so I could pretend I was driving a car, making sound effects along the way, and thereby fulfilling the line item on a young boy’s job description that reads embarrass mom. Small as I was, the only way a lot of heavy groceries mattered was the inertia you had to overcome to start it rolling. Once you got it rolling it wasn’t much effort to pull or push it along. That said, obviously we didn’t live where there were a lot of steep hills,

Time passes, the universe expands, and now I have a car of my own, and also two Very Nice grocery stores in easy walking distance from my house. But I’ve often thought about that old grocery cart I used to pilot along when I was still in single digits, because I dislike having to use the car just to drive a couple blocks when I knew I was buying more than I could carry. It just seemed ridiculous. The advantage to city life, in a good neighborhood, is you can walk everywhere. I have a good backpack I often use to go grocery shopping with, but even that has its limits. Plus, and alas, some places here have signs on the door saying “No Backpacks”. This is why we can’t have nice things.

I would see folks from the senior housing in my neighborhood, piloting their own grocery carts along and it kept reminding me to look into getting one of my own. But most of the newer ones strangely have four wheels, like a lot of roller luggage now too, and I just don’t grok that. To push one of those along upright on all four little wheels just looks unstable to me, especially when navigating cracks in the sidewalk and curbs. And I suppose all those years piloting a grocery cart way back when probably gave me some muscle memory for the task of balancing things on two wheels. My good Briggs & Riley luggage is like that with wheels that are a tad oversized compared to other makes.

So a couple months ago I looked into it, thinking I might just try to find a “vintage” grocery cart like the one mom had. But it seems these little grocery carts have had some serious rethinking since I was a boy, and I ended up with what you see in this photo… 

This design might be very new since I’ve never seen it being used before on the sidewalks around my neighborhood, and I see the folks from the senior housing here using them lots. But it’s really Really nice. Well made, well thought out.

The bag is detachable, holds as much as I remember mom’s cart holding and folds into a small space, as does the frame which is Way more substantial than the one mom had, or any other ones I’ve ever seen. And that weird arrangement of wheels on it actually makes going up and down steps and curbs a snap.

I’ve used it a bunch since then, and just this morning when I brought back a bunch of stuff I would never have been able to carry otherwise. Now the car can sit peacefully until I need to go to Trader Joe’s because that’s too far to walk.