It's hard to picture a grocery trip without a shopping cart. We grab one at the door, toss in the week's groceries, and maybe plop a toddler in the seat. But not so long ago, shoppers carried everything in a basket over their arm. The cart that changed all that started with a humble folding chair.
Here's the story. In 1936, Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oklahoma, wondered how his customers could buy more groceries if their arms didn't get tired. He put a basket on a folding chair and imagined wheels on the legs. His shopping cart debuted on June 4, 1937. At first, almost nobody wanted to use it.
From Folding Chair to Folding Cart
Goldman worked on the idea with a mechanic named Fred Young. Their first cart was a metal frame that held two wire baskets. Because the design was inspired by a folding chair, Goldman called them "folding basket carriers."
Another mechanic, Arthur Kosted, figured out how to mass-produce them, inventing an assembly line that could form and weld the wire. Goldman advertised his invention as a "No Basket Carrying Plan." He had already been a pioneer of self-service stores, where customers picked items off the shelves themselves, and the cart fit right in.
Nobody Wanted to Push It
The cart did not catch on right away. Men thought pushing one looked unmanly. Women thought it looked too much like a baby carriage. One offended woman reportedly told Goldman, "I've pushed my last baby."
So Goldman got creative. He hired male and female models to push the carts around his store, showing how handy they were. He also hired greeters to explain how they worked. Before long, shopping carts became extremely popular, and Goldman became a multimillionaire.
The Fight Over Nesting Carts
Goldman's early carts had to be unfolded before use, a bit like a folding chair. In 1946, an inventor named Orla Watson came up with a better idea: a cart with a swinging rear door, so one cart could slide right into the back of another. That made carts easy to store in long, neat rows.
Goldman filed for a patent on a similar "Nest-Kart" in 1948, and a legal battle followed. In 1949, Goldman gave up his claim and recognized Watson's invention. Watson's company, Telescope Carts, received his patent that year, and Goldman got a license to keep making nesting carts.
Little Upgrades Over Time
Even before Goldman, a supermarket co-founder named Joseph Weingarten offered wheeled carriers for shopping baskets in the 1910s. Goldman added a child seat to his carts in 1947. Seat belts for shopping carts didn't come along until 1967, when David Allen introduced a retractable version. Oddly, the idea had been around for ages: back in 1909, Bessie DeCamp invented a seat belt for chairs, go-carts, and carriages.
Carts still differ around the world. Most American carts have swiveling front wheels and fixed rear wheels, while in Europe it's more common for all four wheels to swivel, a difference linked to smaller stores there.
So the next time you wrestle a cart free from the row at the grocery store, tip your hat to Sylvan Goldman and Orla Watson. One saw the possibilities in a folding chair. The other figured out how to make carts stack neatly, and both changed the way we shop.
