Probably fixed wheels are cheaper to make and maintain.
Well, yeah, but presumably they’re cheaper in the UK too.
Ikea uses four steerable wheels on their shopping carts and they are awful. They are not a solution to any problem I deal with in stores. They do aggravate me to no end. With fixed rear wheels, a slight nudge on one side turns the cart but it maintains its momentum around the turn, so moving and turning is easy. If the cart has four steerable wheels, nudging it on one side rotates the cart about its axis but doesn’t cause it to change direction. To turn, you have to push on one side, pull on the other, and then change the orientation of force to push it in the new direction. You effectively wrestle with it to overcome its existing inertia and impart new inertia. It’s exhausting when the cart is heavy (like at Ikea). Four steerable wheels is really only manageable with smaller, lighter carts.
In my experience, American stores have bigger, heavier shopping carts than English stores, and Americans shop less frequently than the English, so Americans tend to have their carts more heavily loaded. They aren’t quite Ikea-sized, but our carts are big enough that they would be a pain to turn if all four wheels turned.
When American stores do have smaller carts, they often have four steerable wheels. It always seemed unnecessary to me on the smaller, easy to maneuver carts, but this thread gives me a clue why they do it. Shoppers would probably be more likely to slide the lighter carts sideways to get out of other shoppers’ way, but that might increase the wear on the fixed wheels, which could go out of round. Four steerable wheels solves the problem at minimal inconvenience to shoppers.
Ultimately buy, of course. Any technology that hastens a business to sell less stuff is probably not going to have people beating a path to get at.
When you shop, it’s better (for the salesman) for you to think, based on evidence of your muscles, or whatever, that “I really didn’t shop (buy) all that much, (and still can…).”
ETA: Don’t Brits call these things something different? Even in the US, they go by completely different names, which escape me at the moment, but I’ve seen them used in surveys of regional English.
Weird. My experience is that otherwise they are the same. The point of the four-articulated-wheel arrangement is that you can move the cart sideways rather than having to make a U-turn or whatever. Very helpful in a crowded aisle.
Brits call them shopping trolleys.
It’s possible I don’t have enough experience shopping in English stores to have an accurate impression. I’ve only traveled there as a tourist but I went to the grocery stores several times. I noticed their trolleys were much smaller than our carts. Then again, these were urban stores, so maybe they don’t have typical trolleys.
I guess I also don’t make enough U-turns in stores to care about that ability. I find the four turning wheel carts to be much harder to maneuver. I think the supposed benefits are dubious.
American cars are also bigger and less nimble than European ones. We have enough room that we don’t have to build things small and agile.
We don’t generally need to dodge around a bunch of other people, in narrow aisles, at our supermarkets since they’re far more spacious. The ability to go sideways isn’t a benefit. Being able to steer the device with a single hand is far more useful for us.
(Note: I’m not implying that either of these is better. Just that the situation is different, and hence the tools.)
That’ll never take off.
In Middle Tennessee we call them buggies.
In New Zealand they are called Trundlers which always makes me giggle
When I want to make a 180 change in direction, I just walk around to the front end of the cart and push it backward, continuing this until I happen upon a convenient spot to turn the cart around. Really, the cart runs equally as well pushing it forward or backward. The steering behaves diffently when you’re pushing it backward, of course, but I don’t find that to be a problem.
And, interestingly, I was about to post a similar thread when I saw this one reanimated.
I’ve noticed that the floor of the local Wal-Mart where the carts are kept has a very rough surface, so you can’t really tell if you have a banger or not. Past this rough floor, there is a floor with a different pattern, but still very rough. It isn’t until you are about 5 or 10 yards from where you pick up the cart that you can really tell if the cart is a good one, or not.
While it is entirely likely that the rough surface at the entrance is designed to be less slippery in wet weather, so to reduce falls, I always think that they are just trying to keep people from abandoning the bad carts in the cart storage area, figuring that once a [del]sucker[/del] valued customer has gone 5 or 10 yards and then discovers the defective wheel, he is more likely to keep the bad cart.
On a different, but similar, note, the Kroger close to me now has carts that, when a line of them are collected, will curve front to back, like a banana; only the wheels of the middle of the line are touching the ground. That way, when the cart wrangler has collected a herd of carts, he can turn them without dragging the rear wheels laterally. It looks as if there are people working on the problem.
World’s fastest shopping cart, 73 m/h/117.8 km/h: good
Ditto with groceries: better
Ditto smashing into wall: even better
Ditto filmed with high-speed photography under controlled conditions: best
ETA to above. I hope they come back: