Whenever I am forced by my wife to shop with her at a certain big box department store that is taking over the planet I have never seen a person who appears to weigh less than 300 pounds riding one of the store provided electric scooters. What percentage of users of these shopping propulsion devices for the physically disabled are actually using them as intended?
[Moderating]
I’m preemptively reminding posters to keep resposes to this factual. Studies or data addressing this issue should be preferred to anecdotes.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
To be fair, a lot of the 300 lb’ish people are handicapped in one way or another due to obesity related problems. Especially if they’re over 45’ish or so.
Many have to use canes or have had multiple surgeries. You may see them riding a chair in the store and think they’re just lazy because they’re sitting down, looking healthy. Once you see them standing up though, they might have trouble making it from the trunk of the car to the passenger/driver’s seat.
My guess: the scooters are good PR to show that the store is handicapped-friendly, but they’re really intended for the easily-exhausted obese. Note that they’re a LOT larger and more “heavy duty” than the complementary scooters shopping malls offered in the 1990s. Scooters used by the elderly are much smaller, and the oldsters will usually use their own rather than one provided by the store. The disabled seem to use their own wheelchairs, whether manual or electric, when I’ve seen them at big-box stores.
I don’t believe this question can be answered. Obesity and disability are not distinct concepts. If people are substantially limited in the activity of walking, that is a disability. It doesn’t matter if they are of a healthy weight, if obesity contributed to their inability to walk, or if their inability to walk or other medical condition contributed to their obesity.
Since we are talking about scooters in a store, I don’t believe they are provided due to any legal requirement (e.g. the ADA). The stores are providing them for the benefit of their customers who have difficulty walking and are doing so as a business decision. This muddies the distinction between obesity and disability even more, since no legal definition of disability applies to the store’s choice to provide the carts.
Further, legal definitions of disability generally do not apply to temporary conditions (e.g. broken legs, pregnancy). But I think we can all agree that someone with a broken leg, or expecting twins any day, while not legally disabled, could have a pretty good reason to use a scooter while shopping.
Aren’t you twisting cause and effect ? Maybe the 90s ones were really intended for handicapped people, but broke down too easily when obese people used them, hence prompting the stores to buy sturdier versions ?
I honestly have no idea, mind you - there are no store scooters in my part of the world.
I had a cousin who was morbidly obese, and eventually died from it. For the last several years of her life she literally could not walk, and had to get around with a scooter. So at least in her case, her obesity was her handicap. It’s very possible that, among all the handicapped people using public scooters, a large percent of them have obesity as their handicap, along with other problems related to the obesity. Yes, the scooters are being used “as intended.”
Sadly, over the past couple of decades the United States has gone “supersized” resulting in high obesity rates resulting in numerous serious health issues that these unfortunate people and society must deal with. I don’t want to sound mean but in how many cases can my word unfortunate be replaced with overindulgent? I have recently suffered a terrible but hopefully temporary leg injury in a traffic accident resulting in 4 surgeries to repair my rt. tibia which was broken in 5 places and am scheduled for a bone graft next week as a final repair. My prognosis is good and I have been out the last couple of months with my wife and hoped to use the store scooter instead of crutches. However, I have on two occasions had to return to the car exhausted because all of the scooters were taken. On both occasions my wife observed two different highly obese individuals check out sitting in their store provided scooter and then get up and walk out of the store.
My mother has been overweight/obese her whole life. Normally she can walk just fine on her own. But a few years ago she had a knee replacement because of her osteoarthritis. I took her shopping one day shortly after her surgery; she could walk with either a cane or walker in to the store (I dropped her off at the entrance, then parked), but once there she used a store scooter. Without the scooter she wouldn’t have gotten much farther. (She’s back on her feet and doing fine now.)
So yes, she was obese and using a scooter, but the fact that she had recently had surgery that temporarily limited her mobility would not have been apparent to an uninformed observer.
I might also suggest that confirmation bias is at work.
I’m sorry for your injuries. But as a formerly morbidly obese person myself, let me put forth something you may not be considering: When I was morbidly obese, there were several occasions I had to use the scooters provided by the store, not because of my obesity, but because I was just recovering from surgeries. I have to have on an average of two surgical procedures a year to remove kidney stones. After these procedures, it’s not unusual for my hubby and me to run by Wal Mart to pick up stuff I’ll need during my recovery, stuff to make me more comfortable, fill my 'script for pain meds, etc. Having just had a surgical procedure done, and it being a super Wal Mart, it’s just too much walking for me. I can make it from the car to the front of the store to get a scooter, I can make it from the front door of the store to the car. But walking the whole store is too much for me.
I am no longer morbidly obese, so I’m sure people look at me and assume some other kind of handicap. However, there were probably half a dozen times I needed a scooter in the store because I was recovering from surgery.
As others have said, sometimes morbid obesity is, in and of itself, a handicap. But outside of that, you cannot assume that just because someone is morbidly obese they don’t have some non-weight-related handicap.
I would have to see some evidence that the scooters are intended specifically for the physically disabled — for one thing, I have never seen anyone abandon his wheelchair to get into a store-provided scooter.
Is it possible the scooters are provided for people other than the disabled, as you assert? They could be provided for the non-disabled elderly, among others.
I’ve noticed this phenomena myself over the last couple of years and it’s not limited to the overweight. I’m seeing what appears to be perfectly healthy people driving around in them.
You can’t see all disabilities. I am a Brad Pitt pretty 46 year old male. In June and July of 08 and Dec 08 I have had occasions to use the scooters due to cardiac illness, open heart surgery and recovery. Nobody has approached me with anything but help, despite what might be assumed by my appearance.
The carts are a very nice convenience when needed, but when I’m doing better, I forego them because they are slow and cumbersome. It is very important for people of limited mobility to get out and be around people such as at supermarkets and stores, it is the highlight of the day, even though it is absolutely exhausting to use one of those carts.
Plenty of people who look “perfectly healthy” may have a condition that is not obvious. I can’t seem to find a very old thread in which a poster told (IIRC) about being harrassed for using a handicapped parking place, then later caught up to the harrassers and had her disabled sister, who was with her, lift her clothing and show them the effects of her illnesses and surgeries. Not visible to the casual observer.
A person can have a balance problem, or a heart condition, or God knows what else I can’t think of, that you can’t see. It’s not all about crutches and braces and wheelchairs. And some people with debilitating diseases have good days and bad days, and even good hours and bad hours. You just never know.
You are able to diagnose arthritis and emphysema (among other conditions) by sight?
Many people have conditions that are not visually evident that may prevent them from walking significant distances without pain or considerable difficulty.
Not to say that healthy people don’t sometimes use the scooters, but it’s very presumptuous to imagine that just because people look healthy to you, or are able to walk short distances, that they don’t need to use the scooters.
The day before I went to the hospital to give birth, Airman and I went to the zoo. By the time we left, I had been on my feet and walking around all day to the point of exhaustion. We had to stop at the supermarket on the way home, where I ended up using one of those scooters. I got a lot of fishy looks from people who assumed I was being lazy. Too damn bad. I needed it, I used it, deal with it.
Robin
I submit that most permanently handicapped people have and prefer to use their own mode of accomodation, and thus have no need for these conveniences provided by stores. I base this on my long association with several people who fall in this category, one of whom ran an association which dealt with various businesses and helpling them deal with accessiblity issues. Still anecdotal I fear.
I would conclude however that nearly 100% of these scooters are monopolized by people who are not permanently disabled. That does not mean that they are not temporarily disabled, or in transition to becoming permanently disabled.
I would therefore expect as a first approximation that the usage of scooters would reflect the general population in terms of obesity. That is, that 50% of scooter users in the USA would be obese.
However, I suspect that (as others have posted) that obesity leads to complications which result in a higher frequency of temporary disabilities (more likely to fracture in a fall, more likely to need a joint replacement, etc). This would lead me to expect an even higher percentage of the legitimately temporarily disabled obese to be scooter users. Morbidly obese and supermorbidly obese people even more so.
That said, every such complimentary device I have ever seen, was provided with the statement that it was for the convenience of the customer. And so the vast majority (excepting perhaps breakdowns and dead batteries) would appear to be convenient for the customers to use. So I would guess 95% or so are being used as intended.
Tons of people can walk into the store but aren’t really able to do significant walking inside it, elconqueestador. My father is a little overweight but not obese, and you might think to watch him walk into the store that he has no reason to use a scooter because he can walk in, but he has three herniated discs in his back, so standing around all day at Lowe’s is very difficult for him and he uses the scooter. (He also has a handicapped parking permit, which I’m sure people think he doesn’t need when they see him use it.)
Yes. If a relatively young person is animatedly directing a flock of children with a non-stop diatribe of instructions then that person does not have arthritis or emphysema. There was no cane, bottle of oxygen or any obvious physical problem that indicated pain or restricted motion.
All of the thoughtful replies to my question have enlightened me greatly as to what I now think is the “intended” use of these store scooters/carts are. The long term disabled most usually already have & use their own scooters or wheelchairs while the store scooters are provided for the convenience of anyone that has difficulty getting around whether they can be categorized as disabled or not. Therefore I believe an obese person who has mobiity difficulties is just as justified using one as I am. Statistically analyzing the issue as to who uses the scooters most is not that important.