My grocery store ritual is elegance defined: clad in my bespoke HAZMAT suit, complete with shopping list strapped to my groin like a Centurion’s skirt, I wheel one clattering cart to the cleaning supplies aisle, fill the basket with as much bleach as it can hold. I then circle to the fresh produce lane, where, after running each blushing peach or head of cabbage through an extensive forensics suite and a test for turgidity under my wrist-mounted air hammer, place each chosen fruit or vegetable into a steel canister, douse it in bleach, and lob in a shaped micro-explosive before quickly pressurizing the capsule.
Working through each aisle to the beat of Skinny Puppy’s cover of Marcos Valle’s 1966 bossa nova opus “Summer Samba”, I replace the jugs of bleach with stacks of Assessment Drums, which, due to fuses inadvertently snipped short when cutting coupons, occasionally jet out of my gloved hands into nearby shelves, sending mildly radioactive capers and gherkins forcibly into the nostrils of gawking housewives. After check-out — completed entirely by placing crisp one hundred dollar bills in the palm of the manager as I skip the registers and proceed to my station wagon — I drive the food to a cold storage cave, into an airlocked vault, and leave each of the samples to proof for a full cycle of the moon. What remains intact and edible after the final sulphuric bath becomes my dinner, or depending on seasonal vagaries, my lunch. I tend to eat a lot of peach pits.
So while I appreciate the idea behind the “Pure Cart” sanitizing system being installed in some grocery stores and will certainly be adding its peroxide-misting system into my own regimen, I do not think I’ll be willing to leave my system in the cave unless these stores let me run not only empty carts through the system, but ones also brimming with food and, god willing, other customers.
Product Page [PureCartSystems.com via Retail Design Diva via Oh Gizmo!]
Don’t people wash their produce anymore when they get home? Do we expect everything to be spanking clean and then put some more cleanser on it??
In Italy they make you wear plastic gloves when shopping for produce .. nice way to increase the carbon footprint …
I agree that some carts are filthy .. but there is a limit to the whole clean frenzy …
You can joke all you want. But children, with their developing immune systems are constantly riding in the seats.
Back in the 1960′s, the Japanese health ministry, noticed the flu pandemics ended during summer vacation.
Anything that can keep little hands from touching and spreading disease is a good idea.
Also, keep in mind that most american men do not wash their hands properly after using the toilet.(cencus taken at baseball games)
I have a friend who is OCD on the whole handwashing thing and a raging germaphobe. I eat dropped food well past the 5-second rule and am healthy as a horse.
In all the grocery stores in my area, they have antibacterial towelette dispensers right next to the carts. Grab one, wipe down the handle and baby seat thing, and go.
I just make sure to lick the cart handle clean each time.
I grow all my own produce in an abandoned nuclear reactor. I get fresh produce year round, and in a pinch the tangerines can double as casual floor seating for adults up to 200 lb., but I’m a little nervous about how the tomatoes have been looking at me lately.
sanitizing schmanitizing. i gotta give props for the skinny puppy reference. “dig it, dig it!”
oh noes, making money off people’s paranoia is sad.
i wonder if one can stuff toddler IN the cart and THEN run it through the mechanism … = instant clean kid
I look forward to outliving the germophobes!
Skinny Puppy FTW.
That’s my worthwhile contribution.
Of course nobody will be cleaning the Purecart sanitizing system itself, which, in a couple of months time, will result in the exposure of every shopping cart to a nice periodical airosol of various bacteria and/or virii.
I think some of the comments were just as entertaining as the story itself.