I usually love The Early Learning Centre and it's toys. We have a whole house full from baby toys, learning toys and slightly older children toys. They are always very good quality and my children love them. For Christmas this year we were bought this shopping trolley, it looks a bit different to that in the picture and unfortunately it isn't as good as we had anticipated.

What is it?

It is a plastic shopping trolley for your little children to use during imaginative play to go shopping with!


What it looks like

The shopping trolley we have is blue and red. It sits upon a red frame which has the wheels beneath it. The handle of the trolley is higher up than on the picture here. It is very obviously a shopping trolley and the wheels are quite big which makes it easy to push although it's not all that easy to steer!


Playing with it

My children love playing with it and when their friends come round it proves popular. Hope likes to collect random items in it and pretend she is shopping. She runs along with it collecting things as she goes and loves using her imagination to pretend she is shopping like a big girl. However, the actual height of the trolley is low. Hope has just turned 4 but she is already too tall to be able to push the trolley in the most comfortable of ways. My baby is 15 months and it's an ideal height for him! He loves to push it along and practice his walking. So I've found that Hope won't play with it for as long as she normally would with other things and I wonder if that is because it is a little bit too small for her.


Quality

Sadly the quality of this product isn't as good as I would expect from this shop. The plastic isn't as robust as normal, making it a little bit flimsy. It still withstands toddlers playing with it but to me it seems a lot cheaper in quality than normal. It is very light so the slightest touch from our baby and it will topple over. The basket itself slots onto the frame and this has come off several times whilst they have been playing. I'm not sure how they have pulled it off but they can never put it back on themselves and it takes a few minutes for me to be able to snap it back into place. This is a bit frustrating for both them and me as it gets in the way of independent play. I think it would be nice to have them able to play without the actual toy snapping and me having to fix it. I'm sure that the Early Learning Centre could have found a better design than this. It is easy to push which is good and the lightness of it is good I guess too as it means that once there are various items inside it it's still easy for a child to push around. Turning corners isn't very smooth though but a basic forward and backwards motion is fine.


What I think

I am disappointed really. It looks like a lovely little trolley but it's really disappointing that it's height is really poor. Hope isn't a tall 4 year old yet she has outgrown this and has to bend a bit when pushing it so that is a flaw that this product has as is the fact that the basket comes away from the frame too. Hope will play with it and her friends enjoy playing with it too as they like to imagine being adults and going shopping so that's nice, I love them using their imaginations I think it's really important for their development, it is just a shame it is interrupted when the shopping trolley breaks! I think the idea is good but a little work on the design could make this a much more practical toy for young children.