I use (and my company uses) cart. However, I have also heard them called
[ul][li]wagon[/li][li]buggy[/li][li]carriage[/li][li]trolley[/li][li]basket[/ul][/li]
with the word “shopping” in front of any of them except carriage and basket. Most of the locals here prefer cart with buggy trailing a distant second, but the tourists are all over the place with which word to use.
You see, I believe strongly in using the word cart, mainly because it’s the shortest of available options and I say it a lot. Moreover, a basket is the green thing with handles that you carry around the store.
The inventor, Sylvan N. Goldman, referred to it as a shopping cart.
There’s a statue of him in a local museum, by the way-- bronze-- pushing one of his inventions. He was a local grocer who invented the cart, then had to hire people to push them around his store until the real customers felt less funny about using them.
He used a share of the profits from his invention to fund the Oklahoma Blood Institute. So, when you use a shopping cart, you’re indirectly saving people’s lives.
It’s a trolley! Or shopping trolley/supermarket trolley.
I thought that when Americans said ‘buggy’ it refered to the thing you push small children around in when they are too small/tired to walk.[FONT=Comic Sans MS]
These days I’m most likely to refer to them as carts or shopping carts, but growing up (in St. Louis, Missouri), we called them shopping baskets, or just plain baskets. And yes, I mean the big metal ones on wheels, not just the hand-held ones, which would’ve fallen under the “other” category on that survey, since it wasn’t presented as an option.
Some of our stores have started providing those pop-up anti-bacterial wipes on stands right next to the carts for wiping down the handles before use, which is really nice.