Grocery Store Artifact: The long, dark shopping cart of the soul

Grocery cart number plate as found in the parking lot.

The plates are very useless because it isn't like we sign a cart out to a customer and they don't keep a favorite cart in the garage or anything. Customers just want one without a wheel that goes buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh and we at the store just don't want them across the street because it is a pain to fetch them.

These number plates drop off regularly like scabs from an unhealing wound. We usually let them remain where they fall, to be swept up eventually like the pale, dead leaves from a failing and diseased tree. Such lonely desolation of the soul it would be to exist as a shopping cart. I do not envy the carts.

Cart #20 will never be identified by name again as it now joins the swelling ranks of the hundreds of other anonymous wheeled baskets. Once a known thing, the cart has been stripped of it's quantifiable '20-ness'. While there is a danger in the unknown, having been freed from the shackles of it's slave-name, it is now a more pure and free form of cart.