The Loyal Trolley

Every wheel is a precision item. Three run true; the fourth is geared so that the trolley will turn left smoothly, willingly, all day, and will not turn right at all. Pushed against its nature it simply stops, with the patient immovability of a horse that has decided the walk is over.

Nobody asked for this. A trolley's entire promise is that it will go where you go. The makers argue, in a leaflet that reads like a manifesto, that this promise is precisely the problem: a shopper who can turn either way will double back, dither at the end of an aisle, and leave having bought the four things they always buy.

What the trolley does instead is impose a spiral. Left, left, left, and the whole shop unwinds around you in one continuous route, every aisle in order, nothing skipped and nothing revisited. Users report finding departments they did not know the shop had. One wrote to say she had been going there for eleven years and had never once seen the fish counter.

It is, admittedly, a disaster near the exit, where turning left takes you back into the bakery. The manufacturer's advice is to keep going. You will arrive eventually, having seen everything, which was the point, and having bought a great deal more than four things, which was probably the other point.