The ShopRite supermarket we visited was packed with people pushing basket-sized trolleys – the average spend here is small by European standards.
"Tutti-frutti!" he exclaimed, pushing a basket of them across the table.
"You're being ridiculous," Mira said, pushing the basket back into the Saks bag and kicking it under her chair.
The murals depict a variety of scenes, including Abraham Lincoln as a homeless man pushing a basket, a marching band wearing gas masks, an old man in a rocking chair with an American flag below the words "No Loitering," and a boy on a swing made out of a life preserver.
Pushing a basket so large that it fairly dwarfed her small frame, Yoshie Takanaka made her way through the aisles of the new Costco store here in this Tokyo suburb with the kind of wide-eyed look of a child on a first visit to Disneyland.
"I know the rich people with money are no better than the people down there pushing those baskets with no money," he says.
Then she'd pushed her basket out of sight, leaving Walter looking at where she'd been, and on out the front window onto Magazine Street.
And at 10, three reality stars, three musicians and the actor Vincent Pastore try to form enough celebrity power to push Lemon Basket, a restaurant in Los Angeles, into the same league as Ago, Robert DeNiro's eatery, in "Famous Food".
Thus we do recognize a mental component in DiMaggio's grace, in the beautiful and devastatingly effective motions of Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali and even in the sheer force of Shaq pushing through to the basket.
"It was just someplace you could come and get all those odd things — shoe polish, curtains, mops, safety pins, paintbrushes, pillowcases," said Georganne Uxbridge, 56, waiting in line for the checkout counter and pushing her heavy shopping basket along with her foot.
Now, every Saturday morning at the Maltby Street Market, shoppers wielding wicker baskets and pushing prams amble past the salvage yard while munching on samples from the Borough Cheese Company and Neals Yard Dairy before stocking up on biodynamic vegetables from Fern Verrow.
