Patent Application
20220126794
A shopping cart is a wheeled cart supplied by a shop or store, especially supermarkets, for use by customers inside the premises for transport of merchandise as they move around the premises, while shopping, prior to heading to the checkout counter, cashiers or tills. Increasing the amount of goods a shopper can collect increases the quantities they are likely to purchase in a single trip, boosting store profitability. Studies have shown that it is advisable for shoppers to sanitize the handles and basket areas prior to handling them or filling them with groceries due to high levels of bacteria that typically live on shopping carts. This is due to the carts having a high level of exposure to the skin flora of previous users. There have been no products available as original equipment or as an aftermarket to address this problem.
There are a multitude of means by which shopping carts may be infected or otherwise made dirty. Carts may be used to held sick children, raw meat can drip through packaging onto the cart, sick operators may spread germs onto the cart's handle, and babies may defecate on the cart. As such, shopping carts need to have a method to be sanitized between usages or on a frequent basis. There have been no products available as original equipment or as an aftermarket to address this problem either.
There exists a need for a shopping cart washer that is not being met by any known or disclosed device or system of present.
The shopping cart washer is a structure enabled to automatically wash shopping carts, receiving dirty carts on one end, and outputting the cleaned cart on the other end. Said carts are transported through the structure by means of a moving conveyor belt. Towards the entrance of the structure are pipes that emit steam and strategically placed sprayers to squirt the carts with water or cleaning fluid. Towards the exit are cooling fans horizontally placed to blow on outgoing carts, cooling and drying them before removal from the conveyor belt.
Throughout the description, similar reference numbers may be used to identify similar elements depicted in multiple embodiments. Although specific embodiments of the invention have been described and illustrated, the invention is not to be limited to the specific forms or arrangements of parts so described and illustrated. The scope of the invention is to be defined by the claims appended hereto and their equivalents.
Reference will now be made to exemplary embodiments illustrated in the drawings and specific language will be used herein to describe the same. It will nevertheless be understood that no limitation of the scope of the disclosure is thereby intended. Alterations and further modifications of the inventive features illustrated herein and additional applications of the principles of the inventions as illustrated herein, which would occur to one skilled in the relevant art and having possession of this disclosure, are to be considered within the scope of the invention.
Throughout the present disclosure the term ‘interleaved’ is used to refer to the undercarriage spray array disposed between halves or parts of the conveyance belt. The term spray array refers to a row and a column and any combination of rows and columns thereof array of spray nozzles or orifices for cleaning the shopping cart.
Although the operations of the method(s) herein are shown and described in a particular order, the order of the operations of each method may be altered so that certain operations may be performed in an inverse order or so that certain operations may be performed, at least in part, concurrently with other operations. In another embodiment, instructions or sub-operations of distinct operations may be implemented in an intermittent and/or alternating manner.
While the forgoing examples are illustrative of the principles of the present disclosure in one or more particular applications, it will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art that numerous modifications in form, usage and details of implementation can be made without the exercise of inventive faculty, and without departing from the principles and concepts of the invention. Accordingly, it is not intended that the disclosure be limited, except as by the specification and claims set forth herein.
