Tag Archives: shopping cart

A Granny Cart That Looks Like Luggage: Someone Actually Built It

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Walking to the grocery store with a wire granny cart has always been practical but never particularly pleasant. The wheels rattle over every sidewalk crack, the wire basket looks like it escaped from a hardware aisle, and your tomatoes inevitably get crushed under a bag of potatoes. As more people ditch cars for walkable neighborhoods, the tools for hauling groceries haven’t really kept up with how design-conscious those people actually are.

That’s where Roulette Cart comes in. The Manhattan Blue version looks less like something you hide in a closet and more like a piece of luggage you wouldn’t mind leaving in your entryway. A padded navy bag sits on a slim aluminum frame with four small translucent wheels, the whole thing reading as upright and intentional. It’s built for people who walk to the store regularly and want something that feels considered, not just functional.

Designer: Futurewave for Roulette Carts

The interior actually makes a bigger difference than you’d think. Unzip the front, and the bag opens into a bright orange compartment with vertical bottle sleeves, small pockets for eggs or berries, and a wide cavity for everything else. You can slide wine upright without worrying it’ll tip, tuck leafy greens into their own space, and stack cans without turning your bread into a pancake. The 40-liter capacity feels more like organizing a rolling pantry than just dumping bags into a void.

Of course, none of that matters if the cart falls apart on cracked sidewalks. The lightweight powder-coated aluminum frame stays rigid when loaded, while the skateboard-style TPU wheels roll more quietly than cheap plastic ones that sound like you’re dragging a shopping cart through a parking garage. The four-wheel stance lets you push it like a stroller instead of tilting and dragging behind you, which helps when you’re navigating crowded aisles with 15kg of groceries.

Living with it in a small apartment feels surprisingly well thought out. The slim footprint and upright posture make it easy to park in a hallway without it sprawling into your living space, the way folding chairs tend to. The padded handle sits at a comfortable height so you’re not hunching on the walk back, and the detachable bag means you can lift just the soft part up a few stairs without wrestling the entire frame into a narrow elevator.

The materials are chosen for durability without shouting about it. The bag uses tough nylon, the frame is aluminum, and the wheels are high-quality TPU, the same stuff in skateboard wheels. These feel less like features to brag about and more like insurance against wet sidewalks, weekly grocery runs, and those trips where you bought way more than you planned and need everything to survive another six blocks home without collapsing.

Roulette Cart doesn’t reinvent walking or shopping, but it does make the annoying parts less annoying. The hauling, the packing, and the storing all get a little easier, and the whole thing looks deliberate enough that you’re not embarrassed rolling it through your neighborhood. It treats a routine errand with a bit more respect than a wire basket ever could, which turns out to matter more than you’d expect.

The post A Granny Cart That Looks Like Luggage: Someone Actually Built It first appeared on Yanko Design.

This floating cart could become a dream come true for shoppers and workers

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The shopping cart, also known as a trolley or buggy, is one of the most essential tools people use inside stores, especially supermarkets, both for customers as well as store workers. Despite its importance, its design has basically remained unchanged in almost a century, even when that design doesn’t really take the comfort of users in mind. Yes, the four wheels and the spacious metal basket can hold your groceries and take them from one point to another, but they are difficult to control, heavy, and more importantly, unable to climb up or go down the stairs. This prototype tries to address those pain points to make dealing with groceries and packages easier, safer, and more accessible.

Designers: Geonwoo Park, Hyungeun Park, Wooyong Park, Dongjae Lee, Murim Kim, Seung Jae Lee (Seoul National University of Science and Technology)

Shopping carts are so iconic that they have literally become icons in digital stores that don’t have anything to do with wheeling physical objects around. Despite that popularity, they’re not exactly the easiest tools to use and offer only the bare minimum convenience so that we don’t have to carry our groceries. Considering their cheap and mass-produced designs, it’s no surprise that many have damaged wheels that make them difficult to turn. These wheels also don’t let you drive the cart up or down places that don’t have inclined planes for them to roll on.

Palletrone’s solution is to do away with those problematic wheels completely. Instead, it uses a rather large drown to lift a platform that will hold your groceries and boxes. There’s also a cage around the drone to protect humans from those powerful and dangerous propellers. Think of it like an upside-down basket with the drone inside, flying to keep the platform off the ground.

The description might sound simple, but there’s definitely a lot complicated technology involved. For one, the Palletdrone always flies at around the person’s chest height, which means that it will also ascend or descend as the person goes up or down stairs. It also doesn’t tilt so that the contents on top of it don’t slide off. Finally, it moves and turns as the person pushes or pulls it, so the experience is more or less exactly like a shopping cart minus the wheels. And it can do all this by knowing if the force being exerted is being done by a human or from the weight of the objects on top of it.

This floating and hovering “cart” sounds dreamy and very useful both for shoppers as well as personnel who have to bring goods from storage to the aisle. That said, the design is far from perfect, let alone presentable and aesthetic. For one, everyone who has ever used a drone will know how noisy they can be, especially one of this size. For another, the current Palletrone is only able to carry less than 3kg of cargo, which is significantly less than a family’s typical grocery bag. It’s a start, though, and one that finally addresses one of the biggest inconveniences when going to the supermarket by boldly giving the decades-old shopping cart a do-over.

The post This floating cart could become a dream come true for shoppers and workers first appeared on Yanko Design.