Nobody Would Use the Shopping Cart, So He Hired Actors to Push Them Around the Store

US2196914 was granted to Sylvan N. Goldman on April 9, 1940. The title is "Folding Basket Carriage for Self-Service Stores." It is the shopping cart, and the reason it exists is pure retail arithmetic: Goldman had noticed that his customers stopped shopping the moment their handbasket got heavy.

Goldman owned the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oklahoma City. Self-service grocery was still a fairly new idea — customers walked the aisles and gathered their own goods into a wire handbasket. The flaw was obvious once you looked for it. A full basket is heavy and awkward, and a shopper carrying one simply stops adding items and heads for the register. The store's ceiling on any given sale was, quite literally, the weight of what one person could carry.

The story goes that Goldman was in his office one evening in 1936 looking at a folding wooden chair, and the pieces assembled themselves: put wheels on the frame, put a basket on the seat, add a second basket below, and let the whole thing fold flat for storage. He worked with a mechanic named Fred Young to build it, and the first carts appeared in his stores in 1937.

Nobody wanted it

The customers ignored them. Completely.

Goldman later described walking his stores and watching shopper after shopper take a handbasket and walk right past a stack of perfectly good carts. When he asked why, the answers were about identity rather than utility. Men found the cart unmanly — they had arms, they could carry a basket, they weren't going to push a little wheeled trolley around. Women told him it looked entirely too much like a baby carriage, and they had pushed enough prams already.

So Goldman solved a psychological problem with theater. He hired people — men and women of varying ages — to walk his stores pushing carts and filling them, acting as ordinary shoppers. He stationed a greeter at the entrance to hand a cart to each arriving customer and demonstrate its use. Real customers, seeing that people apparently like themselves were using the thing, started taking carts.

It worked. Sales rose sharply, because the ceiling on a purchase was no longer what a person could carry.

What it built

The shopping cart did not just get adopted; it reshaped the store around itself. Aisles had to widen to accommodate two passing carts. Package sizes could grow, because a shopper no longer had to carry them. The bulk pack, the family size, the "stock up" trip — all of it depends on the cart. Modern supermarket layout, from aisle width to checkout design to the parking lot, is built around a wheeled basket.

Goldman became very wealthy — his cart-rental and manufacturing business made him one of Oklahoma's richest men — and later designed the nesting cart, the familiar telescoping design that stacks front-to-back and eliminated the folding mechanism entirely.

The invention itself was straightforward: a chair with wheels and baskets. The hard part, as it so often is, was convincing anyone to touch it.

See the original

The full text and figures of US2196914 are on patents.us.