Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Aug. 17, 2010

Husband hits a retaining wall on aisle 7

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Last week my wife and I were in the local Wal-Mart. She’d gone somewhere or other, and I was left alone in the freezer section, admiring a very attractive box of lime sherbet. I was the only one in the aisle for a moment or two, and then I heard the rattling of a shopping cart. Down the aisle galloped a boy, possibly four or five years old, pushing an empty cart at speeds of over 70 mph. He was much shorter than the cart, and with his arms extended all the way upward to the handle and his feet flying, he reminded me of Sisyphus, the Greek king who was forced to push a boulder up a hill for eternity. Except that if this kid had been the mythical Greek king, that boulder would have been up and over that hill in nanoseconds and the whole myth would have fallen apart.

The kid flew past, forcing me to hug the freezer. At the end of the aisle he collided with an innocent lady who’d had the temerity to push her cart into his path without looking or sounding her horn. There were no injuries, and the boy simply shifted his cart into reverse, rerouted his course, and sped off to break another Wal-Mart land speed record in another aisle. I don’t know where his parents were, but my guess would be they were all the way across the store in the automotive section, hiding.
It was all very entertaining, and as he terrorized shoppers on neighboring aisles, I had a thought. No, it had nothing to do with Wal-Mart installing traffic control spike strips, only with the different varieties of shopping cart propulsion styles.
For one thing, while I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule, when men and women are shopping by themselves, they propel their carts altogether differently.
We men stride in a brisk, business-like fashion, behind our carts. We go to the store with an objective. Maybe two objectives, tops. Our wives have written our objectives down and we want to procure those objectives and escape the store before something bad happens. The bad thing that might happen is that our wife might call us on the cell phone because she just remembered 87 more things we need to pick up.

Women push their carts at a more leisurely pace. That is because most women do not simply rely on a list. Part of their shopping arsenal involves osmosis. As they slowly work their way down each and every aisle, head swiveling from side to side, eyes sparkling with excitement, things occur to them. When a man goes to a store for a gallon of milk, for example, he looks at his list, which says “milk,” gets the milk, and heads for the checkout. When a woman gets her gallon of milk, that reminds her of cheddar cheese, which is also a cow-related product. Cows, of course, remind her of ground beef, and the “ground” part reminds her of coffee grounds and coffee filters, which remind her of paper products, which sends her off for some toilet paper, which reminds her of cat food, which for some reason reminds her of Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, and Mrs. Paul reminds her of one of her second cousins, who was briefly married to a man named Paul, or maybe it was Harold, who inhaled an entire jumbo shrimp into his lung, which reminds her of decongestant spray, and so on and so forth until her cart is fully loaded with things which were not on her original “milk” list.

So when a man has, through some serious strategic error, wound up in the store with his wife, the problem is just who gets to push the cart. The wife of course, due to her osmosis shopping style, is the only one who knows where she’s headed at any given time, so she wants to push the cart. The husband, on the other hand, realizes that he is only a useless appendage who does not understand osmosis, and believes he should be allowed to push the cart so he’ll look like he’s actually doing something. (It will also give him something to lean on.) My preference is for Marilyn to simply go wherever the spirit moves her, with me and the cart following behind. But she feels uneasy with me and a loaded shopping cart following her, since once, several years ago, she claims I ran one of those little cart wheels into her heel in an effort to encourage her to get it in gear. She never forgets things like that.

So our compromise is that I do sometimes get to push the cart, but she insists on holding on to the left front of it and guiding me along. This makes for a very clumsy arrangement, much like trying to steer a bicycle with somebody sitting on the left handlebar. You cannot get up much speed, and you have a devil of a time trying to turn right, even if your wife agrees.

Now that I think about it, that kid in Wal-Mart was only doing what came naturally to him. He was practicing. Sometime in the distant future, when his wife sends him to the store to “pick up a few things,” he’ll be ready. And if they both wind up at the store at the same time, he can just wait in the car. Or grab an empty cart, strap on his helmet and zip around the parking lot until his wife returns and makes him stop.
 
I know there are dozens of other shopping cart driving styles, which incorporate things like high speed cornering, chassis roll, aerodynamic drafting, lapping other carts, and occasional pit stops, but I’m no expert. If you need to know more, I’m sure the Federal Department of Wobbly Shopping Carts will soon appropriate a half billion bucks and do a statistical study. Lord knows we can certainly use another study.