Shopping carts were first rolled out at Piggly Wiggly

In 1936, a Piggly Wiggly grocery store owner in Oklahoma City invented the shopping cart. The contraption was initially termed a “roll’er basket.” 

Sylvan Goldman came up with the idea for the shopping cart while observing his customers lugging their groceries around his store in hand-held baskets.

 

“People had a tendency to stop shopping when the baskets became too full or too heavy,” he said. 

Goldman and Fred Young, a mechanically inclined maintenance employee, started tinkering. The duo developed a cart with wheels that supported two baskets. By golly, customers could double their shopping pleasure. 

Goldman placed an advertisement in the Oklahoma City newspapers, showing a woman exhausted by the weight of her shopping basket. “It’s new – it’s sensational. No more baskets to carry,” the ad said, referring to the new shopping cart. Ta-Da. 

But the launch turned out to be a flop. Customers didn’t want to use the new invention. Men thought they would appear “weak” using the carts; women thought the basket carts were unfashionable, “like pushing a baby buggy around in the store.”

 

Goldman hired male and female models of differing ages to push the rolling carts around in his store, pretending to be shopping. It worked. Soon, the carts were a big hit. 

By the end of 1937, Goldman established a separate company to manufacture carts for the Piggly Wiggly and Humpty Dumpty stores that he owned in Oklahoma City as well as other supermarket chains.

 

It was reported that by 1940, many companies were on a seven-year waiting list for the new shopping carts. (Goldman’s shopping cart production business evolved into Unarco Industries LLC, based in Wagoner, Okla.) 

It was also during 1940 that a shopping cart graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

 

“The winds of change began to blow through supermarkets as the layout of aisles were changed, along with the design of the checkout counter,” commented a grocery industry spokesperson. “Supermarkets were totally revamped to accommodate shopping carts.” 

In 1946, Orla Watson, a machine shop owner in Kansas City, Mo., noticed the huge space taken up by shopping carts in front of stores. He invented carts could be fitted into one another, or nested, for compact storage.

 

Rohin Dhar of Priceonomics, based in San Francisco, said: “Few inventions have so profoundly shaped consumer habits. With the exception of the automobile, the shopping cart is the most commonly used ‘vehicle’ in the world. Some 25 million grace grocery stores across the United States alone.” 

He said the shopping cart “has played a major role in enriching the forces of capitalism, increasing our buying output – and for its role, it was dubbed the ‘greatest development in the history of merchandising.’” 

In a contemporary world, Sissi Cao of Observer Media in New York City identified Stephan Schambach of Germany as the “inventor of online shopping carts.”

 

“In the mid-1990s, during the height of Silicon Valley’s first dot-com boom, Schambach built the first e-commerce software, called ‘Intershop Online.’ It was the backbone of all shopping websites,” Cao wrote. 

“While online shopping was already changing the entire economy, the coronavirus pandemic put the transition into hyperdrive,” she said. 

According to Frans Van De Schootbrugge of Publicis Sapient, a digital consulting group headquartered in Boston, Mass., “online shopping volumes have more than doubled for grocery retailers in the wake of COVID-19.” 

“In order for grocers to remain competitive, investment in reshaping the business and embracing a digital-first mindset now is critical to owning a share of the market.”