The Life-Cycle of The Shopping Trolley

As we all know, the shopping trolley has a symbiotic relationship with the goods on sale in a shop. The trolley provides transport and safety for the shopping*, while the shopping secretes - or 'leaks' nutrients into the trolley that transports it. The reality of human shopping means that the shopping is introduced to the trolley, but then cruelly removed before this relationship can fully develop. But this relationship with shopping is an essential part of the trolley life cycle.

After mating with other trolleys using the lock and chain arrangement, a shopping trolley will wander off down a supermarket aisle on its own, acquiring the necessary shopping needed for the next stage of the breeding cycle. When the trolley feels it has enough shopping, it will just stop in the centre of the aisle and will remain there seemingly unattended and abandoned, but in reality it is a kind of pupae stage.

A few days later, the trolley and its shopping will seem to have disappeared. In its place will be a small herd of shopping baskets.

At first, supermarket naturalists and car park scientists assumed that shopping baskets and shopping trolleys were two distinct species. However, extensive research by the American professor of Supermarket Car Park Studies at Harvard - Prof Gerrymander Couchstain - has let to the startling - but now widely accepted - view that the shopping basket is just the young sexually immature form of the shopping trolley.

Now with greater understanding of the trolley/ shopping basket life-cycle and the recent unravelling of the trolley DNA, the attempts to breed other forms of trolley may grow apace. This means that in the future we will no longer have to witness those failed mutant shopping trolleys, produced through ill-conceived breeding experiments, usually found outside DIY stores that seem incapable of carrying anything that doesn't immediately fall off.

*The life-cycle of shopping is also fascinating. Its aim in its all too brief life is to move from the hazards of the supermarket shelf into the relative safety of a cupboard or fridge. One there the shopping quickly mutates into a form that the shopper cannot recall having ever purchased and actively dislikes. So the shopping is then free to enter its next stage where it grows a protective mould, enabling it to meet and breed with other discarded shopping in the rubbish bin. Unfortunately, the rest of its life-cycle, on the rubbish tip and so on, is beyond the scope of this article.