Welcome back to the SW Florida Grocery Shopping Chronicles, a place where we talk about all things grocery shopping with our audience from Marco Island to Cape Coral.
This is a place where you can share your grocery shopping experiences − good and bad.
Have a tip? A money-saving hack? An idea for a grocery shopping poll question? Or, maybe, you just want to vent and tell us what is wrong with grocery shopping in 2026 and how it might be fixed. Any kind of random grocery shopping thoughts will do!
This week’s Grocery Shopping Chronicle: Sarah Moriarty
For this week’s Grocery Shopping Chronicles we are hearing a plea from Bonita Springs resident Sarah Moriarty.
Smaller grocery shopping carts. Especially for senior shoppers like Sarah.
“I was surprised when I moved to Florida and found the grocers only offered BIG carts,” Sarah said in the email she wrote. “Where I have lived before, there’s always been an option to use a smaller sized cart. That would be particularly useful here in SW Florida with its senior population and single household shoppers. You would think Publix only wants to serve families. If we single seniors could choose small carts, there would be less congestion in the aisles.”
To drive home her point even further, Sarah said:
“In some grocery stores we don’t have a choice in cart size and are therefore forced to use the huge carts that are way too big for our smaller needs,” she said. “And these RV-like monsters are a big factor in congestion in the aisles.”
Sarah said she does her grocery shopping at Publix where there is the one cart option and baskets for carrying a small amount of items. Publix also has motorized scooters for people with special needs. But there are grocery stores in SW Florida with smaller carts as an option, like Whole Foods, which also has a “regular” sized cart and baskets.
A survey of grocery shopping cart options might be in order and look for that, perhaps as a follow up to Sarah’s chronicle. In fact, she challenged us, saying: “If I were a good investigative journalist, I’d probably drive around and see what other stores are using. But that’s not my life now, so I’ll rely on my Publix experience.”
Sarah said she used to shop at Winn Dixie on 41 south of Bonita Beach Rd.
“I loved going there and one of the reasons was the choice of carts. They actually had a small size,” she said.
In subsequent emails, Sarah made some other good points, like this one, about grocery shopping cart size.
“The congestion problem does have other dimensions,” Sarah wrote. “It can be hard to squeeze around another cart if the shopper hasn’t pulled it right up against the shelves. Sometimes they just leave it in the middle of the aisle. And the problem is worse when staff are working from their big carts stocking shelves.”
Sarah also said the oversize cart can sometimes be a problem at checkout. She will push her cart in and then realize she can’t reach the items in the front of the cart and there’s no way to squeeze around. It’s the same problem if she goes in first and drags the cart behind her, only to find she can’t reach the stuff at the back including her purse.
The challenge this presents is real for Sarah, and very likely many other grocery shoppers in SW Florida.
“I’m 82 and infirm so I don’t have the strength to pick up my oversize cart, or someone else’s, to move It over and out of the way. I also can’t carry one of those baskets,” she said.
We think Sarah summed things up nicely and with a little humor at the end of the last email she sent.
“OK, so I’m just an old person whining about the difficulties of getting older. But I do remember having a family with three teenage sons and how easy it was to fill up one of those big carts,” she said. “But that was then in another life in a different market. Now, it’s just me and my ten items lost in and behind that tank of a cart. And I suspect there are more of us 10-item shoppers in this market than big families. Do grocery stores do market research about such things?”
And the last word?
“Don’t get me started about wanting to buy cherries and the bag is big enough for a big family,” Sarah said.
What do you think? Does Sarah make a good point? Should grocery stores in places like Naples and Fort Myers and Cape Coral that have limited options with carts make a better effort to appease a significant piece of their consumer base with an alternate, lighter, smaller grocery shopping cart?
Tell the Grocery Shopping Chroncicles what your opinion is.
Grocery Shopping Chronicles: What’s your story?
We encourage our loyal SWFL Grocery Shopping Chronicles audience, like Sarah, and so many others who have sent in emails, to tell us about their grocery shopping experiences and observations. Anything goes! We’d love to hear from you − about anything. Send me an email at mbickel@gannett.com.
This week’s grocery shopping poll question
Grocery shopping is not easy. It takes time. It takes some creativity, especially with budgets. It takes patience. And sometimes it takes having a good sense of humor based on what you see and experience in the aisles of the grocery store you shop at.
Which brings us to this week’s SW Florida Grocery Shopping Poll.
Question: What is your biggest challenge when grocery shopping?
You can take the poll here, or use this interactive voting tool:
FYI, the interactive voting tool allows you to comment and we encourage comments!
You can also send an email to mbickel@gannett.com with your thoughts about food items you buy for hurricane season.
Mark H. Bickel is the Audience Development Director for The News-Press & Naples Daily News. Reach him by emailing mbickel@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: Grocery Shopping Chronicles: ‘Giant’ carts not a good fit for seniors
Reporting by Mark H. Bickel, Fort Myers News-Press & Naples Daily News / Naples Daily News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Mark H. Bickel, Fort Myers News-Press & Naples Daily News | USA TODAY Network
