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Have you ever grabbed a shopping cart and wondered how many other people used it before you? How about what the grocery cart has carried?
Although most grocery stores provide wipes for customers to sanitize cart handles, Brook Highland resident Hugh Lee didn’t think it was enough, especially knowing the carts are used to transport spoiled meat and garbage from the stores.
“I said, ‘There’s got to be a better way to do this than having the customers coming in and cleaning their own carts,’” Lee said.
So back in 2011, Lee began to research alternatives to the wipes to sanitize the carts more effectively and efficiently. Through a long journey of development and refinement, he produced a mechanism to sanitize not only shopping carts but also wheelchairs in hospitals.
“[They are] two of the most dirty things in the entire world,” Lee said. “If you go look at anything or go Google anything, these are going to be somewhere in your top five dirtiest [things in] public places.”
Lee said that while hospitals, nursing homes and grocery stores have protocols on how to sanitize the carts and wheelchairs, he doesn’t believe there is consistency in how it is executed. The machine he has created makes cleaning as easy as pushing a button and running the object through an opening.
The machine is a square arch just big enough to run a shopping cart through, and it’s portable. It’s made of fiberglass and hooks up with a 36-hour battery. Companies can run anything through it, and the machine will spray a fine mist from a solution of the company’s choosing over it.
“We want to be part of their throughput,” Lee said. “I don’t want to change up the way people are doing things today. I want to make it that if you want it outside by the cart corral, that’s fine.”
Lee’s company, Sanitizit, has already partnered with Western Supermarkets and a couple of Piggly Wiggly stores to get the product going, and he is in the process of working with some other high-quality grocery stores.
“I think it would have a tremendous impact on the [retailers] because it is, once again, doing one more thing to show that they care for the customer,” Lee said. “It’s not a secret that grocery carts are dirty. It’s not a secret that wheelchairs are dirty. Hospitals and grocery stores can take that step to say, ‘Hey we’re going to actually do something about that.’ I think it would mean a lot to customers.”
In response to questions such as, “What about the checkout lines?” and “What about the waiting rooms in hospitals?” Sanitizit has also developed a backpack. It uses the same concept as the machine and will spray a fine mist for two hours nonstop. This product is relatively new, and it can be used to clean virtually anything.
“Every new business, every new idea and every new invention takes a lot of time to get off the ground,” Lee said. “It’s just really trying to find that first mover. That’s really the big piece — that first chain that’s really going to take hold and be innovative.”
