The Real Trolley Problem: the UX of shopping carts

I review the trolleys at Carrefour, Alfatah, and Imtiaz, so you can choose your next grocery store more wisely

I know what you’re thinking.

“Aren’t all shopping carts the same?”

No, no they are not. Just like how all chairs are not the same.

So as I while away my finite time on this earth doing mundane tasks like grocery shopping, I figured I may as well make it a little more entertaining for myself and review the user experience of the carts.

For this research, I walked into Carrefour, Alfatah, and Imtiaz, picked the first cart I could get my hands on, and just rolled with it.

Note: if you’re reading this over email, I recommend switching to the website link, since this post contains GIFs and they work better on the site.

Variety

Not all grocery trips are created equal. So some options would be nice.

Carrefour offers the least variety, with just one type of trolley and one type of hand basket:

Imtiaz gives you one large trolley, one hand basket, and a small basket-cart thingy:

But wait.

Upon closer inspection, it appears that in the otherwise-identical large trolleys, Imtiaz had two different varieties of wheels:

“Big deal. Who cares?” you say to yourself, as you continue reading an article on shopping cart reviews.

Well, as you’ll soon find out, this is going to be a major UX problem.

But on to Alfatah for now.

They have not one, not two, but three different varieties of trolleys.

Here’s the entire family together, in small, medium, and large sizes:

Yes, I arranged them for this photo

Side note: they also have the worst type of hand baskets, the ones that start cutting into your palms:

Both Carrefour and Imtiaz have used their logo colors/branding on their handles. Confusingly, Alfatah has also gone with a red/blue scheme instead of their differentiating green/yellow palette.

Size

Initially, I measured Carrefour’s cart using my phone:

But I felt this wasn’t accurate enough, so I switched to using Dawn bread packets for the measurements.

The length is two-and-a-half bread packets, and the depth (at the deepest point) is three packets and a bit.

The key takeaway is that the cart is a little too deep for my liking, because you have to arch your back to reach down and pick anything off the base.

For Imtiaz I used the Gatorade system: 3-and-a-half Gatorades long and 2-and-a-bit Gatorades deep.

At this point, I felt I was doing a disservice to my subscribers, so for Alfatah I had the foresight to bring along a measuring tape. Only the best, most accurate content for my dear readers.

The large trolley at Alfatah measures 38.5 inches long, with a depth of 14 inches:

This fixes the ‘too deep’ problem with Carrefour’s carts, but does compromise on fitting in some larger items. However, this cart at its narrowest point is perhaps a little too shallow.

Withdrawal experience

Your very first interaction with a shopping cart is to withdraw it from the corral.

At Carrefour, the trolleys are easy enough to find, right at the entrance of the store:

But because this is right at the entrance, when you take a trolley out, you have to step outside the store, and into the mall. Which is not a great experience when it’s crowded outside.

And the withdrawal movement itself isn’t very smooth:

At Alfatah, the trolleys were scattered everywhere at the entrance, so in a way, this was the easiest withdrawal experience I had. Obviously at the cost of it being an absolute mess:

Update: several minutes later, someone had neatly aligned the carts (each of the three sizes in their separate column). Which provided a much better visual experience:

But now it was a much worse withdrawal experience: you have to go all the way into the rink and then all the way out, backwards. And the largest trolley is barely wide enough to go through the barriers, so you have to keep it perfectly straight to avoid crashing into them.

At Imtiaz, the withdrawing experience was fine.

But it’s the depositing experience that was frustrating.

Remember the two trolleys that look identical but have different wheels?

That means that one is slightly taller than the other.

So when you try to deposit your trolley back into the corral, if the one in front of it isn’t of the same type, you get this:

Sigh.

Handling

Carrefour’s carts handle just fine. Not bad, not great. The wheels are misaligned, which makes it difficult to corner, but it’s not the worst offender in this review.

At Alfatah, I tried all three varieties.

The biggest one is wayyy too heavy to handle comfortably.

And it’s also a danger to your legs. I smashed my shins against the bottom rack twice, because it’s too long and therefore too close to where your legs are supposed to go:

The medium one had a misaligned wheel:

Bringing this meme to life:

This made it near-impossible to turn corners, and the trolley itself was bumpy the whole time.

The small cart was the best of the lot. Lightweight and breezy, it zipped and zoomed across the surface with ease. One-handed turns and buttery-smooth mobility:

This was a top-tier experience.

Which brings us to Imtiaz.

The handling of the large trolleys is absolute dogshit.

These carts are simply too large for the store they’re in.

Want to turn around? Sorry:

Want to pass by a fellow shopper? Just squeeze through and make sure not to hit them:

And you’d better hope there’s no one coming from the opposite direction here, because this is a One Trolley At A Time Aisle:

It’s obvious that they’ve just sourced a bunch of trolleys without putting much thought into the usability in this specific store.

The alternative is to use this neat little basket-cart, ideal for the narrow aisles at Imtiaz:

The downsides: it’s too small for a big haul of groceries; it’s too deep for people with bad backs to reach down in; and I’ve seen toy cars with better wheels than this:

The Straight Line Test™

To test the manoeuvrability and wheel alignment of the carts, I developed The Straight Line Test™.

In this test, I manually align the wheels to all face the same direction, push the cart to give it some momentum, and then let it go to see how far it can travel in a straight line.

The farther it goes in a straight line, the easier it is to manoeuvre, and the better aligned the wheels are.

Here’s Carrefour doing alright in the Straight Line Test™:

Alfatah’s big trolley gets a perfect score. Just watch how the wheels remain aligned with the tiles:

But this is no cause for celebration, because this cart achieves the perfect score by virtue of being far too heavy to actually turn with ease. (I’m starting to see a flaw in my Straight Line Test™).

And here’s Imtiaz’s comical attempt, practically turning a full 90 degrees:

Maintenance

It comes as no surprise that all three stores had poorly maintained carts.

At Carrefour you can see that my cart is missing a rubber corner:

I’m not sure what the purpose of this rubber piece is, but almost every other cart also had a corner missing:

Alfatah is no better. Misaligned wheels aside, the plastic was almost entirely scraped off the handle, making it unpleasant to grip:

And I spotted multiple carts with missing handlebars, at which point it’s obvious that those trolleys should’ve been removed a long time ago:

Worn-out and broken handles are a recurring theme at Imtiaz as well:

I get that it’s hard to maintain carts in high-volume grocery stores. But some of these carts are clearly past their usefulness, and keeping them in circulation is poor customer experience.

Final Verdict

Short version: everything is bad, stay home, order online.

I’ll give Carrefour some respite considering that their cart is supposed to be taken beyond the store and into the mall, onto escalators, and through the tarmac on the parking lots, so it’s going to be roughed up more than the others. Despite that, they’ve done okay.

I recommend Alfatah’s small carts. They’re a delightful experience. The other options are bad.

And please just avoid Imtiaz as a whole. Not just for the carts, it’s an awful overall experience, including the parking, the entryway, the layout, and the general dinginess.

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Bonus thoughts

• I’ve often come across shops in other countries that put baskets and trolleys in the middle of the store in addition to the entrance. I think that’s genius: if you dropped in for a quick errand but then were on the fence about getting too much stuff, those middle-of-the-store carts nudge you to use them and may have you spending more than what you’d initially planned to.
  

• Trolley wheels across the board are generally bad, and one reason is that they all spin on their own axis. A simple solution is to limit the movement of the rear wheels so that only the front two wheels are being used to turn - much like a real-wheel-drive car. The downside is this would restrict lateral movement.
  

• Walmart recently redesigned their shopping carts and they’ve been getting some attention.