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A shopping cart (also called a buggy, or a trolley in British English; sometimes referred to as a carriage or shopping carriage in the U.S. region of New England) is a cart supplied by a shop, especially a supermarket, for use by customers inside the shop for transport of merchandise to the check-out counter, and, after paying, often also to the car on the parking lot. Often customers are supplied the convenience of taking a cart in or near the shop and returning it on the car park, and personnel are charged with moving carts from the latter to the former.
Sometimes the customer has to pay a small deposit by inserting a coin, which is returned if and when the customer returns the cart at a designated cart parking point. Some retailers sell "trolley tokens" as an alternative to coins, often for charity. The mechanism can often be unlocked by inserting a key into the slot to dislodge the lock.
This is also done for profit with luggage carts at many airports, where companies like Smarte Carte charge two or more dollars (US) (or equivalent) for rental, and return a small token reward of a quarter (25 cents) for returning carts to the other end of any dispenser machine.
Most shopping carts are made of metal or plastic and designed to nest within each other in a line to facilitate moving many at one time, and to save on storage space. The carts can come in many sizes, bigger ones can acommodate carrying a child. There are also specialized carts designed for twin babies and/or toddlers, and electric scooters with baskets designed for disabled customers. There are even in some stores novelty carts that look like a car or van with a large boot where a child can sit in the seat while shopping can be put in the back.
Shopping carts are fitted with four castor wheels, which can point in any direction to allow easy manoeuvring. However, when any one of the wheels jams, the cart becomes extremely difficult to handle. Note that some carts only have swivel castor wheels on the front, while the rear ones are locked. This presumably improves the steering life of the cart, at the expense of manoeuverability.
Often there is the problem of theft of shopping carts; for example, shopping carts are often used by urban homeless people to carry their belongings. One of the solutions is a system of sensors around the parking lot which block a wheel. Sometimes shopping carts are physically prevented from even leaving the shop, but that is mainly a solution if few customers come by car. Retailers report more than 800 million dollars (US) of missing carts in the U.S. alone each year. Carts are also frequently vandalized and often end up in places such as hedges or streams. There has been many stories of people rescuing stolen carts as a hobby. Some shops offer phone lines for people to report stolen or missing carts so they can be located and returned.
An alternative for the shopping cart is a small handheld shopping basket. A customer can often choose between a cart and a basket, and may prefer a basket if the amount of merchandise is small. Small shops often supply only baskets, where large carts would be impractical.
In Whiting, Indiana in the late 1970s shopping carts were used in one of the first extreme sport called carting. A shopping cart is held outside of a moving automobile and then released with one of two objectives. To obtain the highest maximium top speed for the released shopping cart or to successfully aim the cart accurately at a target, such as a moving train. In addition to the driver there were either one or two athletes who held the moving cart. The driver's objective was to accelerate as quickly as possible. Convertibles were the preferred type of automobile.
See also: moving sidewalk
Using the term metaphorically, an e-shopping cart (electronic shopping cart) is software which allows customers shopping on a website to accept product orders for multiple products from the website. This software automatically calculates and totals orders for customers and indicates the total price including post and packing.
Some setup must be done in the HTML code of the website, and the shopping cart software must be installed on the server which hosts the site or on the secure server which accepts sensitive ordering information.
See also: electronic commerce
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