Anthony Hopkins, looking the part.
When filthy clothes, unkempt hair, and a deject gait aren't enough to signal to the audience that a person is homeless, just picture them pushing a shopping cart full of junk.
More often than not, the aforementioned cart will be run over in a Car Chase, probably in addition to the Fruit Cart. (Although the shopping cart's likelihood of survival is somewhat higher, especially if what it's appearing in is not an action movie.)
Sister Trope to (and in practice a more modern version of) Bindle Stick. See also Cardboard Box of Unemployment, Wallet Moths, and Bankruptcy Barrel.
Very much (and sadly) Truth in Television. Homeless people living on the streets have no apartment to store their clothes, sleeping bag, and food, so they use a grocery cart to carry everything. Some homeless people with untreated mental illness may also be hoarders, so the shopping cart may be filled with junkyard cast-offs.
Examples
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Comic Strips
- Invoked by Dogbert in a Dilbert strip:
Dilbert: Do you think I should grow a beard while unemployed?Dogbert: That's a great idea, a beard sends a message about who you are. I assume you already have a shopping cart and filthy rags.
Film - Live-Action
- In Hard Target, Natasha finds her father's belongings in an abandoned shopping cart. He was the victim of a criminal ring that hosts Hunting the Most Dangerous Game.
- Speed has a variant with an apparent street person pushing a baby carriage of aluminum cans in front of the protagonist's runaway bus, much to the driver's horror until she's reassured of the carriage's contents.
- The documentary Carts of Darkness follows a group of homeless men who race shopping carts as an extreme sport.
- In Yogi Bear, a homeless man trades his shopping cart with Yogi for chocolate.
Literature
- Johnny and the Bomb: Mrs Tachyon the bag lady pushes her bags around in a shopping trolley (which can also travel in time).
Live-Action TV
- CSI: NY had a case involving Shopping Cart Antics - a no-holds-barred cart race through the snow, only rule is the first team across the finish line wins. One team stole a cart from a homeless man who was so upset when he saw they'd damaged it, he killed one of them with a mannequin leg from his hodge-podge of possessions.
- Zeke, Tom Skerritt's character in the miniseries adaptation of The Fallen, is both a rambling, confused-seeming street person with a shopping cart (and a dog, another homeless trope) as well as a flawed would-be mentor to human-angel hybrid Aaron. The shopping cart is later used against Aaron's pursuers.
- Frasier: invoked in "Frasier's Curse," when Frasier goes to return Eddie's unwanted dog food in a shopping cart Martin had taken from the grocery store while wearing unkempt clothes from doing some housework. He sees someone throwing soda cans into a trash bin and takes them out to recycle instead... and an old classmate who happens by sees him, the cart, and the cans and immediately assumes Frasier is homeless, giving him some money and telling him "For God's sake, spend it on food."
- The BBC's 2018 TV film version of King Lear, which is set in modern times, has Anthony Hopkins as the now-homeless King pushing a shopping cart. He was mistaken for an actual homeless person
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- Married... with Children: Marcy and her first husband Steve once had sex in a homeless person's shopping cart.
- On The Wire, Bubbles, the Street Smart homeless junkie, spends several season pushing a shopping cart around, often using it as part of his various schemes. In the fourth season, the entrepreneurial Bubbles runs a mobile mini store out of the cart.
Video Games
- In No More Heroes, you fight Speed Buster, a homeless old lady with a shopping cart that turns into a giant Wave-Motion Gun.
- Carla Reed from Police Quest 3: The Kindred is a bag lady who lives in an abandoned industrial park at 325 Second Street. When Sonny wants to take her for questioning, she refuses due to not wanting to leave STUFF in her shopping cart insecure, which is why Sonny must use handcuffs to attach it to a plumbing system.
- In Crazy Old Bag Lady, your goal is to find the mythical Golden Trolley, which can hold much more useless junk than the average supermarket trolley.
Western Animation
- In the Animaniacs episode "Hooray for North Hollywood, Part 2", Mr. Plotz is fired after rejecting the Warners' script for a very successful movie. When we next see him, on New Year's Eve, he's homeless and ragged with a shopping cart by his side.
- In the Pinky and the Brain episode "Snowball", a homeless Brain pushes a very small shopping cart containing a single soda can.
