I’m not quite old enough to remember a time before shopping carts, but I did grow up in Oklahoma, where shopping carts were invented. Up until 1937, grocery stores had wooden or wire hand baskets. People bought what they could carry, then checked out.
A fellow named Sylvan Goldman, who owned a chain of Humpty Dumpty supermarkets in Oklahoma, tried to figure out how to get people to buy more groceries at a time. If people could carry twice as much when they shopped, they would buy twice as much, and sales in his stores would double.
One evening as he was looking at a wooden folding chair, he got an idea. He set a shopping basket on the seat of the chair, then another on the floor under the chair. What if the chair had wheels? And a handle to push it? And a basket would fit on top and another basket on a shelf on the bottom?
He came up with a foldable metal cart that had room for a basket on top and room for a second basket on bottom. A customer would unfold the cart, set two baskets on it, and wheel the thing about the store. Brilliant.
However, no one, other than elderly customers, wanted to use the carts. Men didn’t want to admit they needed help carrying a basket. And women didn’t want to use something similar to a baby buggy to wheel their groceries about.
Goldman hired handsome men and lovely women to wheel the carts about the stores, pretending to shop. When customers came in and saw the carts being used by both men and women, they began using the carts, too.
One problem with Goldman’s design, is that the carts had to be unfolded and the baskets placed on it. Then the baskets had to be removed and the carts refolded when done.
In the middle 1940s, a guy named Orla Watson came up with a better solution. The back of each basket on his carts had a swinging, one-way door. With this design, carts didn’t have to be unfolded and folded to save space. When one cart was pushed up against another, the one-way doors allowed the empty baskets to nest together.
Watson formed a company called Telescope Carts, Inc.
Sylvan Goldman adopted this new design and developed what he called the “Nest-Kart.” Goldman and Watson spent time in court, fighting over who owned the design and who was guilty of patent infringement. Watson eventually won, but granted Goldman’s company permission to produce and use the carts.
The nesting cart design is still in use today, and we are all familiar with it.
People, after wheeling purchases to their cars, return the empty carts to a collection point. There is no law saying you have to do this. There is no savings. There is no reward. It is a simple, unwritten code of civility, and people, more often than not, do it. I love that.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
