The Strange History of Shopping Carts

QUICK: what’s the first thing you do at the grocery store?? We conducted a super in-depth and not-at-all informal poll of 23 people yesterday and found ~70% say they “Grab a shopping cart.”

So it may be hard to imagine when we say there was once a time before shopping carts – but it’s true *gasp*. To use an analogy, if the world used BSC (before shopping carts) instead of BCE, we’d be in the year 85.

⏪ But it all started a couple years prior… when grocer Sylvan Goldman acquired a chain of supermarkets in Oklahoma. He bought the stores in 1934 – just after the height of the Great Depression – and they weren’t doing so hot.

So he came up with an idea to try and increase sales, and it started with a simple question: Would putting wheels on baskets lead to a better in-store experience and people buying more items?

• Sylvan thought it would – with shoppers not needing to worry about lugging around a heavy basket, they may be more at ease and likely to purchase additional things.

In the mid-1930s, Goldman and handyman Fred Young created the first shopping cart prototype – which looked something like this 👆 – and put them in his stores. But then another problem popped up.

Women compared it to a “baby buggy” and refused to push it around, while men weren’t too fond of the idea that they couldn’t carry all their groceries around the store. Folks stuck with what they were used to and the carts sat mostly unused.

🛒 Fake it til you make it… But Goldman was undeterred. He hired attractive decoy shoppers to give off the vibe that people were actually using the carts – and enjoying them. He also placed employees in the front of the store with the instruction to encourage incoming shoppers to use a cart (one might even say they were “pushin’ C” 😉).

That seemed to do the trick. Carts started to boom in popularity, and Goldman quickly formed a business to began selling his carts to competitors (which became very successful).

• The shopping cart wasn’t the only thing he invented. The grocery sacker, folding interoffice basket carrier, and handy milk bottle rack can all be attributed to Goldman, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society. He died in 1984 with an estate worth ~$400 million.

So the next time a shopping cart dents your car in the parking lot, you know exactly who to thank – Sylvan Goldman, the inventive grocer from Oklahoma.

As Paul Harvey would say, “And now you know… the rest of the story.”

+Fun fact: Goldman only ever achieved a formal eighth grade education.