I hate grocery store shopping carts. They are not made for the uncoordinated. They’re big and, a lot of the time, old, which means they’re squeaky. But mostly, they are uncooperative. One of the wheels is always off to the side or wonky. In those cases, there are two possible scenarios that define your shopping experience. One: the cart has a stubborn wheel on one of the corners that makes it impossible to slide through the aisles. You often have to rely on pure physical strength to get it to the next one. Or two: because one of the wheels is off, the shopping cart suddenly becomes an F1 car: going too fast and crashing into everything.
I tend to avoid Walmart because of this. But when you run out of stuff, you’re forced to return to an environment consumed by dysfunctional shopping carts.
And that is exactly how I would describe my sophomore year at Beloit. Nightmarish.
Everything that has happened to me in the four months I’ve been here has been a Walmart shopping cart experience. I’ve gone everywhere and nowhere in life at once. I am stuck in the same place, with the same activities, with the same people, with the same results, with a dysfunctional shopping cart.
In a generic grocery store, you start off thinking you have control of the cart. You adjust your grip, change directions, slow down, speed up. For the majority of my life, I’ve been pretty good at navigating the store. I know where I’m going, what I’m looking for, and how to get there. This year, however, I realized the cart has a mind of its own. Things that seemed manageable suddenly become complicated, and plans don’t go the way I expect. I am rerouted time and time and time again, desperately trying to find the “peace-of-mind” aisle, only to end up in the “Yik Yak” one. The harder I try to regain control, the more likely I am to find myself in the center of chaos.
The worst part of this is that everyone else seems to be doing just fine. They’re strolling through the aisles, picking up their groceries, and going about their business as if they haven’t just entered the same dysfunctional establishment. Their carts move in straight lines. They don’t have to wrestle with the wheels or apologize to strangers after nearly taking out an entire display of canned beans. Meanwhile, I’m struggling to make it past the produce section. It’s insulting, truly. It makes you wonder whether everyone else has been given a better cart, or whether there’s some secret to navigating the store you missed, or whether they’re just as miserable and better at hiding it.
But perhaps I’ve been too quick to blame the cart. The store itself is hardly accommodating. The aisles are unnecessarily narrow, someone is always standing in the middle of them, and there is inevitably a person who decides the cereal aisle is the perfect place to have a family reunion. You try to maneuver around them, apologize for accidentally getting in their way, and somehow end up behind someone who has spent the last fifteen minutes comparing the nutritional value of two nearly identical boxes of saltines. There is no winning. Even if you manage to get your cart moving in the right direction, something, or someone, is bound to get in the way.
At some point, you have to accept the shopping trip isn’t going as planned. Maybe you won’t find everything you came for. Maybe you’ll spend half of the afternoon trying to get through three aisles. Maybe you’ll leave with things you didn’t intend to buy and forget the one thing you actually needed. It’s beyond frustrating, but it’s also beyond your control. Not every shopping experience is going to be particularly enjoyable, and not every cart is going to cooperate.
When life gives you lemons, though, you keep pushing. You squeeze the lemons or push the cart forward. You do whatever it takes to move, to progress through the chaos. Because at the end of the day, what else can you really do?
And who knows, maybe my junior year will be a Target shopping basket.
Featured image: Betty Cavicchia’28
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