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Lack of shopping carts impact sales at traditional department stores
A month from now, as Santa Claus crawls back up the last chimney and heads home, the retail world will begin its annual postmortem: how did discounters once again manage to trounce traditional department stores?

Need to increase sales in your brick-and-mortar store? Offer customers a shopping cart!
The lowly shopping cart, otherwise known as a buggy, carriage, trundler, wagon, or a trolley if you live in the United Kingdom or Australia, can be an easily overlooked sales tool in brick-and-mortar retail stores. However, in reality, the shopping cart can play a huge role in helping increase the average number of items sold per transaction.

Getting a handle on sales: shopping carts affect purchasing by activating arm muscles
His research demonstrates that the physical properties of shopping carts influence purchasing and spending. Prior research on ergonomics indicates that standard shopping carts, which are pushed via a horizontal handlebar, are likely to activate arm extensor muscles. Prior research on arm muscle activation, in turn, suggests that arm extensor activation may elicit less purchasing than arm flexor activation. The authors thus deduce that standard shopping carts may be suboptimal for stimulating purchases. The authors predicted that shopping carts with parallel handles (such as on a wheelbarrow or “walker”) would instead activate the flexor muscles and thus increase purchasing.