I guess my thinking is that I have been eating food that has come home from grocery stores all my life and don't get sick often.... and even when I am sick, I can usually figure out who I picked up the germ from (a friend, one of my kids who picked up what was going around at school, etc). I go lots of places during the course of the day, and have never perceived the grocery store as being at the top of the list of places in which I need a high level of protection from germs.

Add to that the fact that the shelf-stocker kid may very well have picked his nose right before putting those bags of rice on the shelf, and some child may have picked it up while wandering by before Mommy noticed it in his snotty little hands and returned it to the shelf...

In other words, the packages on the shelves aren't sanitary to begin with.

The handle of a shopping cart is probably germy from dirty hands and baby snot. The little kid seat is probably germy, because people put their purses on bathroom floors and then put those same purses on that little seat-surface thing in the cart. But the *insides* of the cart - at least around here - never have anything in them but groceries. There is so little actual surface area to the inside of a cart, given that they aren't a solid surface and are mostly just holes, that I'm having a hard time envisioning a box of cereal coming into contact with lots of germs OR water. At least with our carts, there are far more square inches of 'hole' than 'wire'.

I guess from my perspective, if the issue is the germs, in the grand scheme of things, the grocery store isn't a deal-breaker.

And if the issue is moisture, it would seem much more effective to just take a paper towel along, quickly dry it off inside, and then put the paper town in a baggie - or even a tupperware container if you're into using only re-usable containers - and tossing the paper towel into your paper recyclables when you get home. Otherwise, if you bring home the wet blanket, you're bringing home whatever germs you wanted to avoid and creating more laundry for yourself. And unless you wear gloves while handling the blanket, you're picking up those very germs you were seeking to avoid as you take it off the cart, put it in the laundry, etc.