We Need Your Help, Vancouver, February 2009

The Killarney Market in Vancouver, B.C. accepts the inevitable: customers will take shopping carts in order to transport their groceries home. Rather than scolding customers or making the behavior illicit, they give permission and provide an extra service: cart retrieval. Sure, this could be better presented and better implemented, but it’s an interesting response to the common behavior, giving permission and supporting the obvious instead of demanding or forcing it to stop.

And a refreshing contrast from the increasingly common post-design solution (using our friend, technology) that locks cart wheels if they leave the property boundary, deterring removal in a rather unsubtle fashion.

Carts and Borders 1, Oakland, August 2006

Carts and Borders 2, Oakland, August 2006

Oh no, Oakland, August 2006

See also:
Curb Appeal
There is Nothing New Under the (Rising) Sun

A curb creates an impromptu parking system for shopping carts at this mall in Daly City, CA.

Related posts:
Affordance Control
More on shopping carts

A few years ago, Gene asked what happened to the IDEO shopping cart?

Well, look what we saw in Japan!

Anne demonstrates how the basket mates with the cart

Minimal cart hardware stacks tightly

Is this the cart, finally? Or did their design partly reflect a solution already in place in other parts of the world?