I usually use (pardon, “borrow”) the yellow bag. I didn’t know about the carts. More specifically, I didn’t know about the finely engineered, high-performance wheels on the carts. These carts are to grocery store carts what Ferraris are to Ugos. These carts are capable, even under the load of curtain, ottoman, dresser organizer, and wooden shelf, of performing a silk-smooth three-sixty rotation without placing even the slightest inhibition upon their primary linear momentum. A linear momentum, dear friend, that can only be described as untouchably perfect.

Try it. Give it a little nudge. You’ll find the cart will continue to roll onward, spinning as it goes, until it delivers the push-bar back into your palm with hardly so much as a wobble. And they can do that consistently. As if they were designed for it. As if they have been waiting all their cart lives to break out of the unbearable monotony of straight-line trajectories. Don’t try that at the Kroger, friend. That’s asking for a cart through the canned beans.*

In sum, IKEA shopping carts may well be designed by the Swedish air defense engineering corps, which if true encourages us to remain on good terms with this sleeping superpower.

*The bean stack, as it were.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 12:37 am and is filed under Musing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.