Today in History—June 4: The Debut of the Shopping Cart

“Can you imagine, wending your way through a spacious food market without having to carry a cumbersome shopping basket on your arm?”

Sylvan Goldman, through a Standard Stores advertisement, asked readers of the Oklahoma City Advertiser that very question this day in 1937, inviting them to try the new shopping carts (“the latest device conceived by the mind of man”) and experience a new way to “shop with an ease never before known” in his supermarkets.

Goldman, the son of Jewish immigrants, learned the grocery trade from his father and uncles who owned stores in Tulsa. He and his brother eventually owned their own stores in the Standard Food Market and Humpty Dumpty supermarket chains, where necessity collided with Goldman’s ingenuity.

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In 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, Goldman needed a way to boost his stores’ sales. He noticed that once shoppers filled their arms or a handheld basket, they stopped shopping. So one night, assisted by a mechanic friend, Goldman fused together a folding chair, a platform, two baskets, and four wheels, and voilà!—capacity doubled and shoppers had a free arm for more groceries.

Goldman’s invention arrived at a moment brimming with technological innovation, cultural change, and great opportunity: Supermarkets were booming. Refrigeration let stores stock more food, the rise in American car culture let shoppers haul more home, and home refrigeration and freezers allowed Americans to keep their purchases fresh longer.

Convinced he had a winner, Goldman submitted a patent application for a “combination basket and carriage”—the first patented shopping cart—a month before debuting it in his stores.

Alas, customers were initially doubtful. Women already pushed carts around (albeit ones with babies in them) and were tired of doing so, and male shoppers thought the cart made them look effeminate. Goldman was confident shoppers just needed convincing (and a smidge of peer pressure), so he hired attractive models, both male and female, to push his carts around his stores.

The gimmick worked: The shopping cart was a success. The first national convention of the Super Market Institute was held in September 1937, and there Goldman’s Folding Basket Carrier Corporation shared Goldman’s innovation with the nation, and grocery shopping was revolutionized.

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