Do Super-sized Shopping Carts Have Potential Attraction?

We’ve all been there. A quick trip to the grocery store for essentials turns into an over-flowing shopping cart. But what makes us purchase so much when we had planned to purchase so little? One thing that might be contributing to our over-purchasing is that metal steel supermarket shopping cart.

Simply offering consumers the ability to use a cart increases the chance a consumer will purchase more, at least that was the thought behind the cart’s creation in 1938. The first carts were composed of two stacked wire baskets. But now we have wide, open-space carts at nearly every supermarket and grocery store, not to mention the flat shopping trolley employed for easy transport of bulk items at stores.

So, are carts truly the reason we’re spending more at the grocery store? Marketing consultants say the ever-increasing size of shopping carts certainly doesn’t help control purchases.An experiment found that when the shopping cart was doubled in size consumers went on to buy 40% more, says Martin Lindstrom, a marketing consultant and author of Brandwashed.It’s not just traditional supermarkets that are increasing sales with bigger cart sizes. Lindstrom notes that Whole Foods’shopping carts nearly doubled in size from 2009 to 2011.Even shopping cart manufacturers tout the power of cart size in increasing sales. Americana Companies, a Shenandoah, Iowa-based company, highlights the double basket cart as a “new way to increase your bottom line with more sales”.

Now that supermarkets all over the world preferred to import super-sized shopping carts,why don’t those supermarket shopping cart manufacturers produce super-sized shopping carts to satisfy customers’ potential needs?