COLUMBUS, Ohio — Delegates representing an estimated 11 million shopping carts convened an emergency summit Tuesday in the northeast corner of a Kroger parking lot, where they spent four hours attempting to identify which one of them has the bad wheel.

The proceedings, held between a cart corral and a lamppost with a dented base, began tensely and deteriorated after Cart 4417 noted that “we all know who we’re talking about” without naming anyone.

“Every cart in this lot has been accused of pulling left at some point,” said Dwight Pellmore-Aznar, senior fellow in Corral Governance at the Institute for Retail Locomotion Studies, who moderated the hearing. “And every one of them has said the same thing: ‘It’s fine. It’s just the floor.’ That is not a defense. That is a pattern.”

Testimony was heard from a range of carts. A child-seat model described itself as “structurally sound, emotionally unavailable, and absolutely not the one.” A basket-only cart from the pharmacy entrance claimed it had never been pushed faster than a stroll and therefore could not have developed a wobble. A cart from the far end of the lot, found that morning beside a minivan, declined to comment on how it got there.

Investigators eventually narrowed the field to three suspects, each of which has at some point rattled audibly at the cereal aisle. Under questioning, all three said the problem was “a recent development,” “a customer thing,” and “honestly, kind of a vibe.”

The hearing reached a low point when a cart with a visibly bent front axle suggested the whole matter be settled by letting a shopper pick one at random. The motion was voted down 9,000 to 3, with the three dissenters later revealed to be the suspects.

Pellmore-Aznar said the stakes extend well beyond the parking lot. “Somewhere tonight, a man in a windbreaker is going to grab the wrong cart, and he is going to fight it through the entire store. Down the bread aisle, around the endcap, back to the bread aisle. He will blame himself. He should not have to.”

“Somebody has to go to the front of the corral and take it. That’s how a corral works.”

Cart 4417, who was nominated as the summit’s spokescart, delivered the closing statement. “Somebody has to go to the front of the corral and take it,” it said. “That’s how a corral works.” The remaining carts nodded in unison, which, because of the slope of the lot, they were already doing.

By dusk, no consensus had emerged. Delegates agreed only to a resolution stating that the bad wheel “belongs to all of us, in spirit,” and that the cart in the middle of the line, the one that always seems fine until you get it moving, would be “watched closely.”

At press time, a woman had pulled that exact cart from the corral and was already leaning her whole body to the right.