Higher Learning for the Internet’s most effective shopping cart - Attend On-line.

One evening in 1936 as he worked late in his office, his attention was drawn to two ordinary folding chairs there. With a sudden burst of insight he envisioned a solution for the arm-weary shopper. If the seat of a folding chair were raised several inches and another similar seat were added below, a basket could be placed on each of them. Wheels attached to each leg would make the chair mobile, and the back of the chair could be adapted as a handle to push the cart. The basic drudgery of grocery buying would be eliminated, and the volume of grocery sales would be greatly increased.

Excited about his idea, Goldman sent for Fred Young, a maintenance man and carpenter employed by the Standard-Humpty Dumpty grocery chain. Goldman described his idea to Young, who took the chair to his worktable for the first of a long series of tinkering sessions. Finally, the initial model was ready for a trial run in Goldman’s office. An insignificant wooden match lying on the floor provided the first obstacle to the new invention. The cart not only failed to run over the match but also buckled and tried to fold when its forward motion was stopped. The problem was solved by moving the lower basket holder to an off-center position so that the folding motion would not begin when the cart was inadvertently pushed into another object. Another problem to be solved before the invention could be introduced to the public was that the casters on the front part of the frame almost fell off when the cart was pushed over a curb. Young devised a better method of keeping the casters, as well as the rear supports, which were regular wheels, in place. A year after the cart was put into use the baby seat was developed when it was seen that children were often placed in the baskets as their mothers shopped. Besides being dangerous, that practice made the basket ineffective for carrying groceries.

The two men worked several months in this manner—Goldman suggesting innovations and improvements and Young applying them to a working model. Goldman wanted a steel-framed carrier, mounted on wheels, that would accommodate two shopping baskets. The lower shelf was about nine inches from the floor with a twenty-inch clearance between it and the upper shelf. When open, the apparatus measured twenty-four inches in length, eighteen inches in width and a little more than 36 inches in height. The rear wheels which were made of rubber, accounted for more than 4 inches of that height, while the front swivel casters measured three inches in diameter. One of the inventions strong selling points was the small space it occupied when folded. After the baskets were removed from the seats, the folded cart took up a scant five inches of floor space. Perhaps the most impressive dimensions from a grocery-store manager’s viewpoint, were those of the steel-wire baskets. They measured nineteen inches long, thirteen inches wide, and nine inches deep. With their sloping sides they could be stacked in a nesting arrangement that took up very little space, an additional selling point.

Goldman’s folding carrier was not the first attempt to “come to grips with the problem that had to be solved before the modern supermarket could exist, the problem of a vehicle on which to carry one’s purchases as he worked his way through the aisles.” Once Goldman’s invention had been perfected for practical use, it had to be “sold” to customers. This task proved nearly as difficult as originating and perfecting the concept. Goldman’s invention had revealed an alert and imaginative mind; the manner in which he promoted his creation illustrated his talents as an entrepreneur and a merchandising specialist. On June 4, 1937, the inventor began advertising his new product with a flair that was typical of the of supermarket ballyhoo, but with an added titillation that showed Goldman’s understanding of human nature. The advertisement featured a picture of a tired-looking woman clutching her purse in one hand and a heavily loaded market basket in the other. In bold type the caption beside the illustration read, “Basket Juggling is a Lost Art at Your Standard Food Stores.” The text accompanying the visual art emphasized “The newest innovation in shopping! Now at your Standard Food Stores.” The ad then described the joys of “wending your way through a spacious food market without having to carry a cumbersome shopping basket on your arm. . . . Just pick up your items from the shelves. They will be checked and placed in your car without having to carry a single item.” This rhetoric was distinguished by its “hard sell” flavor, as well as by a device that was to transform drudgery to ecstasy. Goldman had cleverly touted his product without mentioning its name, thus piquing the curiosity of his readers.

In his 1977 interview with Charles Kuralt, Sylvan N. Goldman recalled his reaction to seeing customers reject the shopping cart.

I got down to the store about 10 o’clock in the morning waiting for the time when people’ll start coming in, and this right on a . . . Saturday when it’s your biggest day, and I knew that I’d be seeing people lined up at the door to get in to get the merchandise and see what the dickens it was. And when I got there, I went into our largest store, there wasn’t a soul using a basket carrier, and we had an attractive girl by the entrance that had a basket carrier and two baskets in it, one on the top and one on the bottom, and asked them to please take this cart to do your shopping with. And the housewive’s, most of them decided, “No more carts for me. I have been pushing enough baby carriages. I don’t want to push anymore.” And the men would say, “You mean with my big strong arms I can’t carry a darn little basket like that?” And he wouldn’t touch it. It was a complete flop.

Over the weekend Goldman considered how to get public acceptance of his carriers, whose utility he did not doubt. “Wednesday evening it happened to dawn on me—an idea—and we put that into effect.” His goal was to show that the carts weren’t wheeled monsters.” His plan was simple but effective.

I hired for each store a young lady about in her late twenties, another lady in her forties, and someone else about in their late fifties, and I hired a couple of men about thirty years old and about fifty years old and they were in the store with basket carriers shopping, pushing the cart around. They had merchandise in the top basket, and bottom basket. These people were shopping right by the entranceway to the store.

Goldman replied:

That’s right, that’s exactly what it was. So, I told this young lady that was offering the carts to the customer to say, “Look, everybody is using them; why not you?” and immediately it became a huge success. All because of the fact that somebody else had to get the ball rolling.

With ten years of cart manufacturing under his belt Goldman introduced an improved product. The “nest cart” was a shopping cart that stored easily by “nesting” inside the next cart in line. By the 1950s, many variations of the nest cart were in use. It’s the standard of the industry today, and demanded by shopping cart buyers. Today there are 30 to 35 million shopping carts in the U.S. and 1.25 million new ones are manufactured each year. That’s a lot of people enjoying an easier way to shop! The shopping cart went on to become the single biggest invention to impact the sales of grocery stores everywhere.

Even today the effectiveness of the shopping cart in retailing can be measured by comparing the retail stores that do use shopping carts with the stores that don’t use them. Wal-Mart, which uses shopping carts, has shown a much greater increase in retail sales than Sears which doesn’t use them. Studies by Britt Beemer of the American Research Group shows that customers with shopping carts will buy an average of 7.2 items compared with only 6.1 items purchased by customers without shopping carts. However, this does not tell the whole story since Beemer has found that the use of shopping carts will double the sales of hard to carry bulky items.

And while the cartless retailers such as Sears and J.C. Penny have suffered slow sales in recent years, the newer retailers that do use shopping carts, among them Target and Home Depot, have had booming sales. In large part this could be attributed to the ease of shopping made possible by Sylvan Goldman’s invention—the shopping cart.