Car transportable personal shopping cart

Abstract

The average shopper in the US goes to the shopping mall more than two times a week for groceries and other items. During the shopping consumers often use shopping carts to move larger quantities of items than they can carry. But the shopping cart that is currently used to increase the carrying convenience of moving groceries stops at the car. From that point on there is still quite a lot of transporting to do to get the bought items to the place where they need to be. This step to step moving of the items results in inconvenience for the consumer. And there are currently no real solutions to make this easier accept bundling items in bags at the cashier, this only takes partial care of the problem. The overall process is a discontinues sequence of steps, and the develop product should help to unify and streamline this process. The project aims to create a product that makes the transportation of groceries from the aisle to the kitchen a more continues process. And doing this by using a product that is prepared for the future of shopping by considering trends and upcoming changes of the (groceries) market. In the end the goal was to create a product that increases the convenience of transporting of bought items. But that also gives the consumer the feeling that they are dealing with an evolution of the shopping cart. And in general streamlines the overall experience of transporting bought items from the shelve to the consumer’s house. The result of the project is the personal shopping cart concept. The cart consists of a shopping basket with a foldable set of wheeled legs mounted to the side of the cart. These wheels enable the cart to slide into the opened trunk of a larger size car (SUV). This is made possible by sliding tracks at the front and bottom of the cart that allow the basket to ‘ride’ in and out of the trunk. The handle pushes the legs together creating a lifting motion to get the cart to trunk height. After that, the user can keep pushing and move the legs upwards, and push them inwards into the car. Additional functionality for the cart is a higher, smaller version. The two halves of the basket slide inward to form a basket that is significantly decreased in size. Then the wheeled legs can be moved towards each other, lifting and decreasing the footprint of the cart. This transforms the cart from a large groceries shopping cart into a smaller more agile retail cart. For this graduation project four stakeholders were involved (University of technology Delft, Graduate student, Design firm and the Client) with all a different goal for the project. So the project was also a balancing act to fulfill all the goals of the involved parties. With the ultimate goal to at the end have one graduated student and one product concept. So next to the development of the concept for graduation, the client was also to be taken along in the process that is required to create a product concept. The project was executed in collaboration with the Dutch/German design firm Design2Gather based in Shanghai, China. The majority of the time spend on this project was conducted from the office in Shanghai. And the project was finished in Delft, The Netherlands.