The Loyal Trolley

Every wheel is a precision item. Three of them run perfectly true. The fourth has been carefully geared so that the trolley will turn left smoothly, willingly and cheerfully, all day long, and will not turn right at all. Push it against its nature and it simply stops, with the patient, immovable calm of a horse that has decided the walk is over. It is, the makers say, the most loyal trolley ever built. It is loyal, specifically, to the left.

Nobody asked for this. The whole promise of a shopping trolley is that it will go wherever you go. The makers argue, in a leaflet that reads rather like a manifesto, that this promise is exactly the problem. A shopper who can turn either way, they say, will double back, dither at the end of an aisle and eventually leave having bought the same four things they always buy. Freedom, according to the leaflet, is bad for groceries.

What the Loyal Trolley does instead is impose a spiral. Left, left, left, and the whole shop unwinds around you in one continuous route, every shelf in order, nothing skipped and nothing visited twice. One older customer, trialling the trolley in an old-fashioned grocer’s shop with wooden shelves and a lit counter, reported finding a whole section of tinned peaches she had never noticed in eleven years of shopping there. The shopkeeper watched from behind the counter and said he had never seen anyone look at the peaches before.

It is, admittedly, a disaster near the exit, where turning left takes you straight back past the biscuits. The manufacturer’s advice is simply to keep going. You will arrive at the till eventually, having seen everything, which was the point, and having bought a great deal more than four things, which was probably the other point. Several shops have quietly returned their Loyal Trolleys, citing “customers who cannot leave”.

Behind the joke is something many shoppers will recognise. Most of us follow the same routes around familiar shops, heading straight for the usual items and walking past whole aisles without a glance. Habit makes shopping quicker, but it also means we rarely notice what else is on the shelves. Anyone who has ever wandered a different way through their local shop and discovered something new knows how easy it is to miss what has been there all along.

So you do not need a trolley that only turns left to see your local shop with fresh eyes. Next time you go in, try taking a different route, or visit one aisle you normally skip. You might find nothing at all, or you might find the tinned peaches. Either way, you will probably get out faster than with the Loyal Trolley, which, to be fair to it, has never once been known to let a shopper leave in a hurry.