I was just thinking about the special grocery carts used by bagboys back in the Cretaceous and groceries were in brown paper bags. They were square, upright, and had two layers seperated by a folding shelf. I think they might have had only two wheels and were tilted back to move them. So far I haven’t been able to find a photo of one.
Like this?
No, I think they mean carry-out carts.
(No endorsement, just a random Google finding.)
I was a bagger at a military commissary when I was a kid and we used those to carry the bagged groceries out to the customer’s vehicle.
Right. Like that, or very similar.
I was born in 1960 (SF Bay Area.) and even then grocery stores had carts pretty much the same as today.
Ok. I think “carry-out cart” is the Google-fu you need.
FWIW, the only place I ever saw those used (as either a bagger or a customer) were US military commissaries, going back to the 70s and up to the current day. I don’t really know why the difference from the normal civilian grocery store shopping experience of the customer pushing a normal shopping cart out unsupervised to their own vehicle.
The proper supermarket term is “bascart” or “baskart.”
Google shows me a bunch of carts that are absolutely not what I was talking about, and presumably not what @Darren_Garrison was either (since they confirmed my findings).
Maybe you were addressing @Whack-a-Mole’s contribution?
Similar to this? Sometimes they have wheels on the front legs, sometimes not. Without wheels they have to be tilted back like a hand-truck to move, but if you put your baby in one in won’t roll out into traffic.
They were what was used in the grocery stores I grew up around in the 1970s up until some time possibly in the 80s. You shopped in “standard” carts, then the bagboys loaded the bagged groceries into the carry-out carts and took the groceries to your car and unloaded them for you. What triggered my question was seeing a newspaper photo from 1989 of the opening of a local grocery store (that I used at the time as a teen) with a bagboy using a standard cart. It got me wondering when the carry-out carts were phased out. (Apparently before car-delivery bagboys were.)
Just pointing out that’s the generic term used within the industry for wheeled baskets of almost any design.
Well, that explains my lack of exposure to those carts in a civilian shopping context, since as a military brat whose military parent was always assigned to a large base with good amenities, the commissary was just about the only place where our family grocery shopped, so I wouldn’t have known anything about how the “other half” did it.
I suppose it’s just old-fashioned conservatism that makes commissaries continue using that when the rest of the world mostly makes the customer bag and take out themselves.
This one looks more like the ones from my 40+ year-old memories.
Yeah. That is very much the kind I used in the late 70s. The one I linked is a new model precisely like the kids bagging in today’s commissary are using.
That’s about how far back my grocery store memories go and I don’t recognize that kind of cart at all. It reminds me of a newspaper rack.
It prevents the cart from being abandoned in the parking lot, either in what would otherwise be a parking space or in the middle of a traffic aisle.
Yes, people shouldn’t do that. But yes, they do.
Until a few years ago my local grocery still took your stuff out to the car for you, though I can’t remember whether they used a separate cart than the shopping carts. Then the owners retired, and the guy they sold the place to took a really well-run business that had been expanding every few years for decades, ran it into the ground, and finally went broke and closed it entirely. The groceries-to-the-car service was one of the first things to go; though if he’d stopped with the first few, it would probably have been OK.
So predictable. Greedy management always thinks they can cut costs and increase profits by cutting services, and they may initially see increased profits, but it never works in the long run; in reality people will pay higher prices if they perceive the service to be better, and decreased service will just drive them to shop somewhere else. They won’t necessarily even ever complain, they’ll just stop coming in, and they’ll tell all their friends why.
Wow. This must be something that was or is highly regional.
Despite my having lived in 6 states and having been in the military on 4 different permanent bases involving all 3 major services I have never seen the idea of two sets of carts, one for in-store and a different style for out into the parking lot. Color me amazed.
Back in the day, baggers were universal and the bagger pushing the cart out to the car and returning with it was commonplace IME. What wasn’t commonplace, and in fact was nonexistent IIRC, was two kinds of carts.
Nowadays the nicer places I shop usually have some baggers, but not one for each checker. And they’ll offer to push your cart out to your car if it looks heavy enough and you look frail enough that it’ll be an issue. I’ve watched that offer happen to others, but evidently I don’t quite rate that degree of service yet myself. 
.
The less fancy places around here the checker acts as their own bagger and it’s your job to put the filled bags into your cart and push it to your car. And return or properly stow the cart to the degree you’re willing = not a selfish jerkwad.
Just recently one of our midrange chains, Winn-Dixie, began stocking two types of carts. One they’ve had all along is the traditional large = long, wide, and deep basket cart with a low shelf down between the wheels and the other is about half the width, one third the length, and has upper & lower baskets. Much handier if not shopping for a feaste or a horde. Here’s a pic of the new ones:
But they’re not for just baggers use or just for parking lot use. Like the full sized and the kiddie-sized carts, they’re for regular shoppers to use inside and outside the store.
Especially if the place is a small-town grocery competing, for those customers with the means to easily go elsewhere, with significantly larger city stores withn 20 - 30 miles in multiple directions; and a lot of their customers work in those multiple directions and so are there anyway. You cannot, cannot, cannot compete with WMart on price. Nobody can. (Sometimes WM’s actually more expensive, but few customers believe that because they assume otherwise and don’t check.) You have to compete with them on other grounds.
They also screwed up progressively in a lot of other ways, nearly all of them apparently designed to cut costs; I won’t go into the details of the spiral, but, in addition to next to no service, they also wound up with very little selection and much of what they did have was crap.
Hard on the residents who don’t have the means or the health to easily go elsewhere. (The old management used to deliver to the housebound for free; that wasn’t most of their base, of course, but nearly everybody else knew they were doing it.)
Part of what’s happened is that the standard carts got larger and larger; and are now hard to maneuver and also, if you’re short, hard to reach into in order to unload them. I always take the short double-deckers (which are a common option around here by now) if I’ve got any hope at all of fitting the load into them – and I’m pretty good at that.
Here’s a picture from about 3 years ago at Nellis AFB’s commissary. Note the cart shown: indistinguishable from the one I linked.
As I said, in every commissary I’ve been exposed to in the last 45 years, baggers bagged groceries and carried them out to the patron’s vehicle in that type of cart, which was essentially reserved for their use. The customer’s shopping cart was done after the groceries were unloaded onto the register.