chuckography

Dangit! Grocery cart wheel wobble!

Saw a man outside of Ollie's in North Charleston, with a shopping cart.

What's unusual about that?

We see people pushing carts all the time.

The ones I choose often have a wobbly front wheel.

That ever happen to you?

















But Jim Wilson, with an Ohio company called CARTS OF AMERICA, was fixing wobbly wheels on Ollie's carts.

I stopped and asked him an obvious question.."what makes a wheel skitter and bounce?"

He said it often starts when a store is collecting carts from the parking lot.

We've all seen the mechanical helper - with a motor - that Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, COSTCO, etc., use where a long string of inter-connected carts are being pushed while a single employee at the front leads the pack to the store.

I said I thought that was a very efficient way to corral a lot of carts at a time.

Jim sighed and said that very often, front wheels get turned sideways. 

It then is being dragged - not rolling - across the lot, creating a flat spot on the wheel. Result: thump,  bounce, thump, wiggle, thump,... well, you get the idea.

I looked into a cart filled with flat-spotted wheels he was replacing. Many had huge clots of material around the hub that could cause a wheel to stop turning.

He said that is dirt and debris found on the floor by stores which don't sweep often enough. Yeech.

I made a mental note to look down at the front two wheels of a cart before I choose it for my shopping.

I also asked how shopping carts can  lock the wheels when you leave the parking lot?  Tim said they have special wheels that lock when they pass over a boundary "invisible fence," a perimeter antenna. Signs on carts advise that this will happen.

Apparently they do work.

In my neighborhood, I used to see abandoned carts pushed into ditches. Some people I saw used them to haul things around their yards, just as if they had bought it at a store!

Uh, that was stealing.

(Click on the photos and links for more details.)

Labels: Cart RF control, Carts Of America, Hays Enterprises Inc., Perimeter antenna, shopping cart repairs, stealing carts, Tim Wilson, wobbly cart wheels.

posted by chuckography @ 2:50 PM