The cart nobody wanted
On 4 June 1937, Sylvan Goldman, who owned supermarkets in Oklahoma City — the Humpty Dumpty chain among them — advertised something new in his stores in the local paper. He called it a folding basket carrier. The idea came from a folding chair, and the 1936 prototype was barely more than that: a pair of them facing each other, wheels screwed on underneath, and a basket sitting where somebody otherwise would have. A mechanic named Arthur Kosted worked out how to build them in quantity.
The logic was simple. A shopper carrying a basket buys until the basket is too heavy, then goes to the till. A cart removes that limit. As Goldman saw it, the invention served both sides: the shopper carries less, the store sells more.
And then nobody touched it
Shoppers ignored the carts. The surviving explanations are consistent: men thought pushing a cart looked weak and unmanly, and women said it reminded them of a pram. One of them gave Goldman a line that is still quoted: "I've pushed my last baby."
Goldman did not try to argue the point with signs. He hired people. Models, men and women, were paid to walk the aisles pushing carts as if they were ordinary shoppers. Someone was posted at the entrance to explain to arrivals what the thing was and how to use it.
It worked. People who saw other people pushing a cart understood that this was what one did here, and took a cart themselves. Goldman patented the design — filed in March 1938, granted in April 1940 — and became very rich.
Why carts nest
Goldman's cart still made work: it folded, but staff had to fit and remove the baskets. In 1946 Orla Watson solved that with a swinging rear door, which let one cart slide into another. That is why there is a row of nested carts waiting at the entrance of every supermarket today. After a dispute over the rights, Watson received the patent in 1949 and Goldman took an exclusive licence.
What stays with you
The story is usually told as an amusing aside, but there is something in it that applies to any new shopping tool: the invention was good from the first day, and it still did not work until somebody showed people what using it looked like. Nothing was missing but the habit.
The same holds now. What changes how much you pay at the supermarket is not knowing that prices differ between stores — everyone knows that. It is the habit of actually checking, inside the shop, before the thing goes into the cart. The same cart nobody would touch almost ninety years ago.
Sources
- Smithsonian Magazine — on Goldman and the invention
- Patent US 2,196,914 — "Folding basket carriage for self-service stores" — filed 14 March 1938, granted 9 April 1940
- Oklahoma Historical Society — Sylvan Goldman
- History.com — the shopping cart's inventor
- Wikipedia — Shopping cart
