The display wheelbarrow

Every garden center keeps one wheelbarrow that never leaves the building: parked by the entrance, loaded with bagged mulch stacked three high, a demonstration of capacity that doubles as overflow storage, since the mulch has to go somewhere and a loaded wheelbarrow reads as merchandising rather than as excess inventory. The pneumatic tire holds air for months without a pump, rated for a load the display unit will never actually carry, since nobody wheels a fully loaded display anywhere; it gets emptied a bag at a time by customers who assumed, correctly, that the mulch on top was for sale and the wheelbarrow underneath was not. The frame gets checked twice a season for the one flaw that matters on a floor model: a weld at the tray's front lip, which takes the most torque whenever someone tips a bag out rather than lifting it clear, and which fails, when it fails, along that exact seam and nowhere else on the tray. A price tag zip-tied to the handle lists the wheelbarrow itself for sale, a fact roughly one customer in twenty notices, and fewer than that ever act on, since a person who came in for mulch rarely leaves having also bought the thing that carried it.

R. Quist