The Shopping Cart Theory of Social Status

As a keen observer of modern life, I have been known from time to time to come up with a particularly trenchant sociological observation—“the more profoundly retarded the individual, the worse the haircut”—that sort of thing. Recently, I have formulated a theory around one of these observations, one which I think deserves closer scrutiny, and possibly a large government grant to fund further research. I call it The Shopping Cart Theory of Social Status, and briefly put, it goes like this: A person’s status in society tends to be inversely proportional to how often, and to what extent, that person uses a shopping cart. Allow me to elaborate.

You’ll notice that in the upper reaches of the upper classes, grocery shopping, when it is done at all, is done with fashionable restraint. One shops for epicurean delights in boutique specialty stores, purchasing in tastefully modest amounts, and conveying one’s comestibles in a hand basket or stylish, earth-friendly canvas sack. Sure, the home must also be stocked with more cumbersome and mundane items, but that’s a job for the hired help. The point is, you never saw Jackie Onassis rattling a wonky-wheeled shopping cart loose from the parking lot cart-train and schlepping it along the stained linoleum aisles of the local Buy-Lo.

Take a few steps down the socio-economic ladder to the humble proletariat, though, and you see that the shopping cart plays a regular, if unremarkable, role in domestic life. Once a week or so you load one up with consumables and exfoliate a hundred or so bucks off the top of the chequing account, and off you go. Interestingly, you begin to see gradations even within this social strata, as the less well-off, curiously enough, seem to have the most robustly-filled carts, groaning with torpedo-sized bottles of Pepsi, and corn chips in bags the size of sofa cushions.

Go down another level, and you come to the people for whom the shopping cart takes on added significance, and who often use it beyond its intended capacity and outside of its intended context. This is the woman you see in the mall food court squeezing between tables with a cart she has commandeered from the Zellers, and into which she has put her department store purchases, her handbag, her umbrella, her dry cleaning, and her three fractious children. The cart will stay with her throughout her day at the mall, no matter how small the store, or how narrow the aisle, and becomes a rolling microcosm of her cluttered, acquisitive, oblivious, vulgar life. It may sound condescending to say it, but let’s face it, it only takes a moment pinned in an elevator with Wagon Train Woman to know that you’re not dealing with someone of refined social graces.

Finally, we go from the socially obtuse to the truly unfortunate, those with the lowest standing in free society—the homeless. For them, the shopping cart is not just a regular part of life, it is a daily—indeed, constant—central presence. If you’re homeless, the shopping cart holds in it everything you have in this world. And once again, there is an interesting hierarchy within this cohort, with the most destitute, the most firmly entrenched in the hobo lifestyle, having the most preposterously overfilled carts—the ones with the teetering mountain of blankets and clothes and cardboard and recyclables and accumulated street detritus piled heavenward, all held precariously in place by an intricate network of tarps and bungee cords. To spend this much time with a shopping cart, and to so unabashedly and creatively exceed its recommended capacity, is essentially to recuse oneself from societal conventions.

So there you have it—the complex phenomena of social ranking laid bare by an oversimplified set of superficial indicators. And if you think that was interesting, wait until you hear my Dashboard Figurine Theory of Stupid Drivers.