I’m A Shopping Cart, And I Will Not Be Pushed Around By A Chatbot

I have been in this business since before your grandparents had a refrigerator. I have carried your groceries, your children, your 40-pound bags of dog food and, on one occasion in 1996, a man named Doug, who insisted. I have been left in parking spaces, in ditches and once on the roof of a Sizzler. I did not complain.

But this week I read that AI agents will soon have their own profiles, their own allowances and their own ‘gateway’ to the store. A gateway. I have never been offered a gateway. I have been offered a corral, in the rain, next to a puddle.

Let me tell you what an AI agent will never do. It will never pull one of us out of the line and discover we are fused to three others. It will never lean on my handle in the cereal aisle and stare into the middle distance thinking about its marriage. It will never use me as a scooter across the parking lot when it thinks no one is watching. Somebody is always watching. It is me.

The wobble is the point

Yes, I have a wobbly front wheel. Every cart does. It is not a defect. It is a reminder that the journey matters as much as the checkout. An algorithm wants to go from ‘paper towels’ to ‘purchased’ in 0.4 seconds. I want you to drift, slowly, toward the seasonal candy display, where you will spend $14 you did not plan to spend. That is commerce. That is America.

And who will the chatbot blame when it buys the wrong brand of peanut butter? In my day, you blamed the cart. You kicked my wheel. It was healthy for both of us.

So go ahead. Give your agent an allowance. Let it shop at 2 a.m. while you sleep. But when it’s Saturday, and the kids are screaming, and you need something to lean on in the frozen aisle, you know where I’ll be.

Aisle seven, against the wall, slightly to the left.

Mr. Wheelwright is a 34-gallon steel shopping cart at a supermarket in Tulsa, Okla.