Has it ever occurred to you how old you are by how you handle a shopping cart?
As babies and infants, we typically don’t get to ride in the shopping cart just yet, we’re still too small for it. Rather, we are carried alongside in a carrier, or held, or placed in one of those awkward slings. It’s a good thing we’re typically not aware of our early years of life, lest we remember all those embarrassing things our parents did to us.
As a toddler, we get to ride in the seat of the shopping cart. It’s like a magical journey down aisles of food, drink, and baked goods. What easier way to annoy the shit out of your parents then grabbing things off of the shelf and throwing them on the ground. Breaking applesauce jars has never been easier. If you’re really lucky, you might even ride in the cart itself, and before you know it, you’re re-enacting Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Titantic, a movie you’ve never seen about a boat you’ve never heard of. Childhood ignorance, ho!
As a young child, you’re too big for the seat, much to your dismay. Your parents routinely tell you that you, in fact, have legs, and that you can walk around the store on them without being carried or pushed. It’s an awful fate for most children, after all, being a child is great, your parents do everything for you and all you have to do is eat, sleep, shit, and play. It’s the American Dream for children under the age of 5. Still, you can take advantage of this situation by running up and down the aisles, tearing coupons out of those red dispensers, folding twist-ties and throwing them, or placing plastic bags over your head. I don’t generally recommend that last one, lest you like breathing.
As an older child, grocery shopping is a love-hate relationship. On one hand, it’s boring, you have to walk a lot, and your parents usually make you carry everything. But on the other hand, you have this fantastic ability to use your powers of persuasion to secure tasty snacks, breakfast cereal that turns the milk colors, and candy from the infamous, magical checkout lane. Suddenly, that shopping cart ceases to be the chariot you once rode, and becomes the pack mule destined for all the Little Debbie snacks it can hold.
However, as a teenager and young adult, shopping is just boring. You’d rather be home playing video games, or talking on the phone, or having unprotected sex with the quarterback of the school football team. That shopping cart is still a pack mule though, you have to have your box of Lucky Charms, or eleven boxes of Cheez-Its. Unfortunately you still have to carry all this stuff inside the house.
As a twenty-something or thirty-something adult, shopping is just the worst. Your parents aren’t going to do it for you, the moment you moved out, they converted your bedroom into a sewing room slash gambling parlor and ran off to Hawaii for a month on the money they would have otherwise spent on your food. Now you have to not only buy your own food, but you have to push your own shopping cart. What is up with that? But you’re twenty-seven years old. You can’t be looking like you’re forty and in a mid-life crisis. So you don’t just push the cart. You pull the cart. From behind. From the side. You twirl it around, powerslide it into the greeting card display. That cart is like a goddamn miniature Subaru WRX STI, and you’re The Stig. All the ladies will see you shopping and be like “Damn you’re so sexy pulling that cart around, buying all-natural food and organic produce, I think all my eggs just dropped, MY BODY IS READY!” For the ladies, guys will just pass by you and profess their undying love for your hands stroking that shopping cart and what it should be stroking instead, especially if he can get a box of Oatmeal Creme Pies and bacon to go with it.
But as you age, into your forties and fifties, that shopping cart ain’t gonna get you laid, or you’re married to the person you impressed with your suave cart skills twenty years ago. Now you just push it along, buying your low-cholesterol food and diet soda, picking up your children’s cough syrup and band-aids. If you have kids, you’re passing the cycle of the shopping cart onto them anew, remembering the irony of your childhood days around the cart. If you don’t have kids, you’re starring at other people’s kids hanging around their parents cart, remembering how depressing that feels.
Finally, by the time you reach old age, you can’t even push the cart anymore, let alone pull it. Thank god for motorized scooters, or your adult children. You’re shopping trips are light though, since you probably don’t eat much, and almost anyone will help an old person reach for the oatmeal on the top shelf. It’s almost like being a kid, only you’re three clicks closer to dying, so you wish you could eat a giant steak right about now and feel better about it.
But regardless of what age you are, a shopping cart means the world to a very special group of people, without it, they would not be able to live, to move around, to hold things, food or otherwise, it’s the alpha and omega, the beginning and end. Push or pull, neither matters, as long as its possession remains intact, moving from place to place.
Homeless people.