Beware the Australian Trolley

The classic American shopping cart has two wheels at the back that are fixed in a forward facing position and two wheels at the front that turn in the direction that they are pushed.  For some reason, one of the four wheels always seems to have something stuck in it so that it doesn't turn well, or it swivels from side to side incessantly as you push the cart around the store.  In contrast, the standard Australian trolley (as shopping carts are known to Australians) has four wheels that swivel and rarely seem to insist on a particular direction.

I give the Australian's credit for designing wheels that obviously rotate more smoothly, but every time I use an Australian trolley I curse the person who decided that four swiveling wheels would be a good idea, and every person after him who failed to see the wisdom of using swiveling wheels on the front of the trolley and fixing the rear two wheels in the same way it is done on everything from strollers to cars.  Granted, the trolleys do have a very tight turning radius, but they are very difficult to control on anything but a perfectly horizontal surface.

For all the stress about child safety in cars (proposed legislation by the Australian National Transport Commission would require children to be in approved child seats until the age of 7), why is no one concerned about the kids who ride in these trolleys.  The "seat-belt" that is provided in the trolley was clearly intended to prevent the child from climbing out of the seat, flipping over the trolley, falling from the highest point of the trolley, or pulling things off the store shelves.  There are no security provisions to prevent a trolley containing a child from rolling down the parking lot or to protect the child when the trolley hits the curb side-on and tips over from the combination of the momentum it gains as it rolls sideways down a hill and its high center of gravity.

This hasn't even touched on the physical challenge of maneuvering a loaded trolley from the store to the car, up and down curbs, and through a parking lot on a hillside, or preventing your trolley from escaping as you load the groceries into the car.  Unless the driving surface is completely horizontal, as you thankfully find inside the grocery store (but not, I might add, inside our local fresh food market), the trolley always rolls downhill.  Rather than pushing on the handle to redirect the front of the trolley in the desired direction, you must walk to the side of the trolley to prevent it from going sideways, drive the trolley cockeyed, or pull on the handle and swing the trolley back into the desired direction.  These techniques must be repeated until you reach either a perfectly horizontal surface or your car.

Once you reach your car, you cannot rely on pointing the trolley into the back bumper to keep it there while you load the groceries into the boot (aka trunk).  In the US, the shopping cart has no where to go, but in Australia there's no such limitation.  If the car is parked in the aforementioned sloped parking lot, then the trolley simply pivots to the side and starts its decent down the hill.  Keeping the trolley in place, while using both hands to lift the well loaded cloth bags, requires hooking a foot around one wheel of the trolley in order to prevent it from escaping.  Moving a toddler from the seat in the trolley to the car without causing collateral damage is an even greater challenge.

I once saw an Australian trolley with fixed rear wheels and was excited that it might be a sign of things to come.  Surely, I thought, as soon as people see how much easier it is to control one of these trolleys everyone would be demanding them.  But people must be awfully stuck in their ways, because that trolley disappeared, and when my local grocery store (the largest national chain) recently replaced their entire collection of trolleys I was disappointed to see the same old wheel configuration.