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Five Ways to Make Carrying Groceries Up Stairs Easier
Don't break your back to feed your belly.
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If you live in an apartment building in the U.S., chances are good it's lacking an elevator—Americans enjoy far fewer elevators per capita than other western nations. This means if you’re renting a place on an upper floor, there’s a solid chance you have to walk up and down stairs all the time. If you’re in decent health that might not be a huge problem—until you go grocery shopping.
Hauling food and other essentials from the grocery store to your house is one thing. Getting all those heavy bags up three or more flights of stairs several times a week can be physically and mentally exhausting. You could pay to have your groceries brought right to your door, but if you’re on a budget and need to keep the pantry stocked without turning shopping day into Leg Day, you can hack your grocery trips with some smart purchases and a bit of engineering.
Here are five ways to make carrying groceries up stairs a lot easier.
Get a stair climbing cart
If you’ve got a standard grocery cart, you know that hauling it up the stairs isn’t easy. The wheels slip and bang into every step, and you need to put your back into pulling it up as you go. The solution: A stair-climbing trolley like this one. The six-wheel design makes pulling it up stairs a breeze, as it remains balanced during the whole operation. There are a lot of variations and sizes to choose from, so if you have just a flight or two of stairs to tackle a cart like this can make it much easier for one person to haul all their groceries from the street to their kitchen.
Use multi-bag clips
If you don’t normally use a cart to haul your groceries and routinely arrive home with a dozen bags that need to be carried up the stairs, you have a choice between making multiple trips or risking amputating your fingers by carrying all the bags at once. Instead, buy a multi-bag carrier clip like this one or this one. While these won’t make those bags any lighter, they make managing holding multiple grocery bags at once a lot easier, as this TikTok nicely illustrates.
Ring up and old-school pulley
Getting bags of groceries up flights of stairs without hurting yourself or losing your will to live is essentially an engineering problem. And that means one of the oldest machines in the world can definitely help: The pulley. As you can see here, some enterprising women living in a walk-up apartment in New York City rigged up a simple pulley system that allows them to lift their grocery bags up easily, without having to run up and down the stairs several times, via the magic of weight distribution and force redirection (which you totally remember from high school physics class). You can find clamp pulleys like this one that can be attached to a railing, clamped tight, and then removed once the bags have been lifted into place.
Use an electric hoist
Of course, pulley systems still require you to flex your muscles and risk your back. If you can attach something permanent and have a balcony of some kind, consider installing an electric hoist to the exterior wall, the underside of the roof, or the balcony above you. With the press of a button you can haul your groceries high into the air for easy retrieval. Just be sure to buy a hoist and not a winch—winches are designed to pull stuff horizontally, while hoists handle vertical lift.
Or just use a laundry basket like a sled
Finally, if you don’t want to spend money or put any time into your grocery hauling solution, you could go completely and totally primitive with a rope and a laundry basket (or any other smooth-bottomed basket). Place your grocery bags in the basket and use a carabiner clip to secure them into the basket itself so they don’t fall out. Then attach a rope to your basket (using another clip or just by knotting it through the handle) and haul it up from higher up the stairs. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it’s a lot easier than carrying fifteen bags up those stairs, and if you have some clips and a basket lying around it’s also a zero-cost solution.
