When I was a little kid back in the late 70s, the local A&P had a unique grocery cart. The basket was mounted really high on the cart with a large space underneath…large enough for a small kid to ride underneath the basket.
The carts didn’t nest like most do. The basket was hinged and lifted up vertically to save space when they were lined up.
I’m almost certain there was something about the design that allowed the cart to go through a slot at the checkout that possibly eliminated the need for a conveyor belt. You just rolled the cart into this slot and walked alongside it and the cashier just pulled the items straight out of the cart.
I can’t remember the exact details and can’t find anything about it on the web. They eventually abandoned this system and went to regular carts and checkout systems.
No information, except to say that you’re not crazy: I remember those types of carts, too. Maybe their use faded away because they required a special, proprietary checkout system to work effectively.
Some grocery stores have a few “monster carts.” They’re heavy duty carts made for stuff like bags of rock salt, or huge bags of dog food. They look a bit like the beat-up specimen in Byzz’s first link, with a small, stout basket on top. Two or three big bags of salt would wreck a regular cart. Many stores now keep the salt outside the store, so they don’t need the monster carts. Customers can pull right up to the skid of salt and throw the bags in the trunk.
If that’s what the OP is thinking of, I seem to remember such carts being used at a nursery/garden center in Connecticut we used to go to when I was a kid. In this case, it wasn’t about avoiding the conveyor belt but making it easier to lift flats of plants in and out of the cart.
How about the power lift cart shown on this page? There are two baskets on the cart. The upper one hinges out of the way and then a lift at the cash register raises the lower one to counter level. Perhaps that’s what was being remembered?
Now that I think about it, one of the stores around here tried a high-basket cart with a drop gate on the front at the same level as the checkout belt. They didn’t use it very long, mostly because the cart didn’t hold much. Folks with big families would be pushing one cart and towing another, and stuff was still falling off the top.
I remember the kind like Byzz posted a photo of…I remember seeing them as recently as 1990. But as AskNott points out they held a limited amount of food. Besides customer convenience, there was the issue of how much money a consumer would spend, IMO.
It’s interesting that the picture Byzz linked to above was taken in Buffalo, New York - that’s where I remember these carts being used in the 70’s and 80’s at (I believe) TOPS Markets. As the OP figured, the conveyor belt was eliminated and the cashier took items directly from the cart. I think the front part of the basket lowered like a gate to make it easier to get the food out.
At the time, it seemed like a dumb idea because of the limited amount of stuff that could be loaded into it, but since the proliferation of warehouse stores, it might be a good way to carry around your 48 roll packages of toilet paper…
I finally put two and two together and now I know which stores use them near me. I was in one yesterday which doesn’t have conveyor belts, and neither do any of the other nearby ‘branches’ (is that what you’d call them?) for that store so I’m pretty sure they use that style. I’ll get a cell phone pic next time I’m in one. BTW, the stores are Food City: http://www.foodcity.com
This looks like it, but the one I"m thinking of only had a support for the basket on one side, or maybe one side and the middle (it appeared off balance) allowing the bottom part to move through the slot under the conveyor belt without blocking the checkout aisle.
