Corned Beef Key

Releasing a supermarket trolley with anything but a pound coin, using objects designed for other purpose in an act of hacking. My local Lidl car park as my lab.

I once heard a cashier talking about people using Corned Beef Keys to open trolleys. I started noticing the missing keys on cans of corned beef in the supermarket.

I liked that this item could be transformative by being used in a way that was never intended. I started searching for other objects with the potential to perform the same task. It was trial and error, but once I knew what I was looking for I started to get a feel for it. After a while I had a pretty good idea of the dimensions and the curvature required.

My success rate got higher. I tested less objects and more succeeded. One evening I rushed to the supermarket to test something I had found on the pavement that day, certain that it would be perfect, only to have jammed something irretrievably in the coin slot of a trolley and hoping that no one saw me.

Feeling the mechanism give way and release the trolley from the long queue of other trolleys is pure joy, and doing so without a pound feels like a magic trick.