I remember when the supermarket bagger would load your groceries into bags, and put the bags in bins to be sent out on the conveyor belt outside where you’d drive your car over and they’d get loaded. I loved that setup, but it’s long gone now. We had this in the greater Boston area, was this elsewhere?
Pleasant Valley, New York, in the 1950’s/60’s. I don’t know how long it lasted.
Even knowing what to call them (and just asking for grocery stores, grocery store checkouts, etc) I’ve been unable to find photos of grocery checkouts showing the carry-out carts from the 1970s/1980s. So many details of recent history are lost because it occured to anyone to photograph everyday things. (Or at least comprehensively tag the.)
I’m not disputing your lived experience. Which as to commissaries is vastly larger and far more recent than my ancient ~8 years in the 1980s, ~3 of which were overseas, and only ~3 of which were on large bases. I just have no recollection of those sorts of carts, nor of baggers bringing stuff out to my car.
I did turn up an apparently recent picture from Moody AFB showing baggers bagging into normal customer-type shopping charts, which I suspect the customers would push out the store, so there is clearly some variability here, even among the bigger bases.
Several years ago when we were in Ausralia, I saw the location in the parking lot for the cart return, labelled “Trolley Park”. Same language, different words. My wife gets annoyed when I say “I’ll take it to the trolley park for you…”
My BiL was in the business for almost 49 years. Worked his way from Bag Boy to Zone Manager at Kroger. Can confirm.
I though this was the type of cart the thread was going to be about because many people have never seen them ( for anyone who hasn’t, these are normally used by people who do not have a car and who are walking home.)
I’ve never seen separate carts just for the baggers’ use. I barely remember baggers and do not remember them bringing bags to the car, This is where my mother shopped when I was a kid - and why I said “normally” about the personal carts. People brought personal carts to this supermarket even if they had a car, because you couldn’t (and still can 't) just push the store cart to your car. Must have depended a lot on location.
I’ve always known that as a “granny cart.”
And they are apparently coming back into fashion here in the UK: “the ultimate eco-friendly shopping companions!”
I want to chip in that I’m both surprised that the type of cart usage I was talking about wasn’t common and that it still being used somewhere today. I had taken for granted that it was a quaint bit of universal (or at least Anericaversal) yesteryear that faded away. Seeing the carts still in use in military commissaries is to me like seeing the classic cars running around Cuba.
One of our local store options still does this, and it’s quite popular. I dislike the layout of that store (and for some reason it seems there are pickles on display everywhere, it’s a running joke to ask “do we need pickles?” every time we walk through) but I like this service!
I don’t know if all stores of this chain have this, though.
It was common in Montreal in the 70s.
My grandmother had one of those carts to wheel her groceries home from the store. She always lived within walking distance of the supermarket.
Worked at Calgary Coop in the mid-70s. The cashier would scan your groceries, another person would bag them and load them into a cart like this and then the carry-out person would wheel it to the customer’s car and load the bags into the car. No such thing as self-serve back then.
A&P* supermarkets in RI & nearby Connecticut in the 1960’s had conveyors. They ACTIVELY discouraged 6 year old boys from riding them. On the upside, they gave Green Stamps, and that same boy was in charge of sticking them in the redemption books.
*The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company
I remember the conveyors. I wonder why they stopped doing that. Maybe it was the liability of 6 year old boys in the carts.
I don’t remember ever having a separately type of cart pushed by people, though.
I still sometimes get my cart wheeled by staff (the same cart i collected my groceries in.) I used to say, “no thank you”, until my daughter worked as a supermarket bagger, and said she really valued the break from bagging she got by taking out groceries.
ISTM the conveyors greatly limited the number of cars that could load at a time. Lie one or maybe two maximum. Whereas with carts pushed out into the parking lot, potentially every car in teh lot could be loading simultaneously.
I suspect this goes along with the explosion of grocery store sizes, and the increasing prevelence of parking lots rather than on-street parking. What works for a two-aisle urban neighborhood market with a butcher / deli counter in back doesn’t work with a 14 aisle supermarket with a 250 car parking lot.
Were they even using scanners yet in the mid-70’s, or was the cashier reading visible price tags and for the commonest items sometimes entering memorized prices? (A good cashier, as I remember it, was surprisingly fast at this.)
I remember Green Stamps! and I was also the one in charge of sticking them in the books. For which I got to choose an item, when we went to the redemption store.
I recently threw out some books of green stamps when i went through my mother’s apartment after she died.