An Invention to Know About: the Shopping Cart | IMAGR

The humble shopping trolley, possibly one of the major developments in the history of commercial merchandising and consumer culture. It may seem like the obvious solution to an easy problem now, but before its time wheeling around your belongings-to-be in a giant metal basket wasn’t always the experience you anticipated from your grocery trip.

What has become a worldwide practice was, like most new inventions, once viewed as an unconventional creation not possible to be integrated into everyday practice. What made the trolley what it is today comes from a history of consumer culture.

Prior to its introduction by Sylvan Goldman, pushing carts and merchandise weren’t exactly affiliates of shopping. Shoppers strolled around the store with a basket in one hand, with the other one free to pick up and browse products off the shelves. began when they picked up the basket, and before that, merchandise was stored behind the counter.

Go further back in time and no trolleys, baskets or any of the like were to be seen. Store owners kept merchandise behind counters and employed store clerks to man the desk. Customers would come in, queue up, and wait their turn to speak to the clerk and see for themselves what merchandise was on offer.

Speaking to a store clerk was the means of not just purchasing, but also browsing potential ones. Customers had direct contact and a chance for discussion about the product. For shop owners, this meant that they would want to enlist a knowledgeable clerk who did more than just wrap items up. But this caused congestion in stores, creating long lines of customers waiting to be served.

In 1937, along came Sylvan Goldman’s version. Owner of the Humpty Dumpty chain store in Oklahoma, Goldman saw his customers struggle to carry the amount of groceries they wanted in a haul. He foresaw the need for large capacity carts that allowed shoppers to do large hauls without physical strain.

It was an existing problem that was inconvenient enough for the masses that it had to be faced and had potential for feasible solutions to be implemented widespread, but wasn’t yet presented with an alternative that could really turn the table as impactful as needed for such a change in consumer culture and behaviour. To invent a product that could carry more food is one ordeal, but to ask a whole nation to change their habitual behaviour is something else completely.

So with that idea that he decided to look further into the shopping trolley, based off of the folding chair. Goldman’s concept was to copy the structure of the frame, letting the frames fold out with room for the placement of two shopping baskets, one on top and the other on the bottom. He coined his invention the “folding basket carrier”. But even as simple a concept and as helpful a creation, the dual basket wheeler didn’t catch on as Goldman hoped for.

At that time, the most common cart on wheels was the baby pram; a distinctive sign of domesticity. Shoppers were not comfortable with its semblance to the baby buggy. Men felt an unwarranted feminine association with the carrier, and women found it difficult to separate it from their motherly duties.

This spurred Goldman on to do more creative thinking. So he came up with the idea of hiring assistants to greet incoming customers with the offer of a trolley, and paid professional models to walk around in-store using the trolley to demonstrate its ease of use.

And with those promotional efforts, shoppers eventually began to look past their initial beliefs and into the personal benefits.

Following Goldman’s product, multiple iterations of the shopping trolley were created. Some additional features and modifications were designed by other inventors, engineers, and draftsmen, and some of those did end up changing Goldman’s trolley. But the final product, however updated or improved, had its founding basis on the version that once debuted in an Humpty Dumpty in Oklahoma.

Looking back at the evolution of the shopping cart, it‘s interesting to note how such a straightforward product has changed consumer attitudes towards the experience of grocery shopping. We went from store clerks, to carrier baskets and pushing carts, and now self-service checkouts. All of these options have their place in the right context; a personalised experience, a lighter load to carry, and more efficient operations. But one thing still hasn’t changed and it's not as straightforward a task to be able to completely do away with this one: the queues. If only there were a way to bring together the best of all worlds and remove the largest obstacle in the process.