Built on a Strong Foundation

If you are a conscientious car owner, you know that in addition to regular oil changes and tire rotation, it's important to get your car's alignment checked. The reason for this is simple - if your car is out of alignment, it means your tires aren't contacting the road the way they were designed to. Driving a misaligned vehicle will wear out your tires extremely quickly. If your car is badly out of alignment, you can actually hear it - the tires make a lot of noise, and that's a bad sign.

How about your shopping carts? Do the casters on your carts make a lot of noise? Do they wobble back and forth when they roll? And worst of all, do you go through a lot of wheel replacements every year due to tread wear? The cause is the same as in your car - poor alignment.

As a metal cart is used, eventually it will bend. It doesn't take much for a metal cart to bend out of alignment - just a few fractions of an inch will cause poor contact between the floor of your store and the wheels of a metal cart. Metal bends, and stays bent; that's one of the properties of metal. Polymer, on the other hand, flexes and returns to its original shape; that's one of plastics' core properties. That is why we chose to make our cart out of engineered polymers - so that your store has no more misaligned carts, no more wobbly wheels to annoy your customers, and fewer wheel replacement costs. ​

-In our focus group research, wheels were by far the most common complaint about shopping carts from both shoppers and store operators. We knew that fixing wheel issues would lead to a better cart for both customers and stores. Since most shopping carts use the same types of wheels, we knew the problem wasn't really with the wheels - the problem was with the alignment.

Using our expertise in making heavy duty components for a variety of extreme-use markets, like construction vehicles, farm tractors, and snowmobiles, we created a polymer frame strong enough to hold well over 1,000 pounds, yet flexible enough that it would spring back to shape after being impacted or torqued. One of the unique properties of plastics is their ability to maintain their dimensions. Bemis is the first (and only) shopping cart manufacturer to create a frame that will always keep its alignment AND hold more weight than a metal cart.

The frame is the foundation on which our cart is built, and that strong foundation translates directly into benefits a store needs - a quieter shopping environment, lower maintenance costs, fewer carts out of service, and no more complaints about wheel wobble.

You can read more about Bemis and our unique frame design here.