By opting for the trolley bag, young urbanites are proving that granny knows best
Do you have a Rolser parked in your apartment, wedged in your vestibule or perhaps sat idling by the coatstand in your office? If you do, then you might just be the coolest kid in town. Let’s bring the uninitiated up to speed.
Rolser is the Spanish manufacturer of personal shopping trollies – aka trolley bags, aka trolley shoppers. In the 1960s and 1970s these contraptions, from numerous makers, were a common sight in most European nations, where they were seen as a handy accessory for the housewife who had to struggle home from the supermarket with food for all the family – industrial quantities of Angel Delight included. And also old folk heading to the shops who were not so steady on their pins (the trolley could nicely double as a Zimmer frame).
With these kind associations, no wonder later generations rebelled against owning a set of “granny wheels”. And men, real men? They would rather have their hands sliced like ham from the hauling home of dumbbell-heavy plastic bags of groceries than take a shopper out for a spin (even when the in-store shopping cart was debuted by Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain, in Oklahoma in 1937, it was met with resistance from the fellas who deemed the invention effeminate).
In Spain, however, trolley shoppers endured across the decades and even thrived thanks to Rolser (the company is the subject of the Expo, skilfully reported by Francheska Melendez and Liam Aldous, in the new September issue of Monocle). Today, 63 per cent of Spanish households own one of its trusty aids. And now this Iberian mobility star is planning something of a global assault – it’s exporting to 60 countries.
But here’s the interesting bit – the new customers include a lot of cool young women and men, from fashion designers to architects, painters to strategists. So what’s happening? Well, if you were to ask the host of the Monocle Radio show, The Urbanist, the answer is that the Rolser is a perfect fit for modern-city living.
Urban planners and civic leaders are increasingly tasked – especially in Europe – with the removal of cars from city streets and the creation of walkable, cyclable neighbourhoods. And as restrictions on driving in our cities multiply, many people no longer want to own a car – and even if they could afford one, where would they park it? Add into this people staying single longer and suddenly the pastime of “doing a weekly shop” just doesn’t feature on many young folk’s schedules. Instead, they head out on foot to stock up on wine, scurry around a farmers’ market for their vegetables or go to a local supermarket to buy food for the next day. And how do they get their weighty purchases home – enter, stage left, a Rolser.
The walkable city comes with many of these interesting consequences. It encourages, for example, the ubiquity of comfy arch-supporting footwear (good news for Birkenstock) over high heels. It entices us to find joy in all this pacing about – hence the feverish fixation with counting daily steps. It’s made the owners of cargo bikes look almost like normal people. Perhaps it even accounts for the demise of the “horizon sock”, that sliver of hosiery that so easily de-anchors from one’s heel and slithers down your foot like a serpent sloughing its old skin. Real socks, the kind that know their place as you walk for miles, that grip your leg as tightly as a joey koala clings to its mother, are back. It’s even helped make “urban hiking gear” a recognised fashion category.
It’s funny that when we think about urban mobility, the talk quickly drifts to big-ticket solutions such as buses and subways but people are quietly finding their own fixes for navigating around their hometowns with greater ease. And for many city dwellers, friction-free living is now aided by ownership of a revamped version of those old granny wheels.
Read more about Rolser’s global rollout in our September issue. And click here to explore the full collection of Andrew’s past columns.
