How the Shopping Cart Went From Failure to Fixture

When Sylvan N. Goldman unveiled his first shopping cart at an Oklahoma City supermarket in 1937, it didn’t spark a retail revolution—it sparked ridicule. Men insisted they were strong enough to carry their own shopping baskets, while women wanted nothing to do with what felt like pushing another pram. 

Despite its awkward rollout, the shopping cart’s eventual adoption—fueled by Goldman’s marketing ingenuity—would make its founding father a multimillionaire, transform retail and become a lasting symbol of mass consumerism. 

The 1930s were a decade of contrasts. Economic hardship gripped much of the country, yet technological progress was reshaping everyday life—particularly within the American grocery landscape. Rising car ownership, electrification of factories and stores, growth in refrigerated transportation and the widespread use of the tractor—which boosted agricultural production—all contributed to the emergence of a new kind of store: the self-service supermarket. 

Gone were the white-aproned clerks behind the counter of a small Main Street grocer. In their place, emerged a new kind of autonomy as shoppers took to open aisles—and open roads. “The model of food shopping so familiar now is put in place at this time: middle-class Americans are beginning to buy their food from out-of-town stores that they reach by car, and they are selecting much of this produce from open fridges ready to put in their own fridges back home,” says Andrew Warnes, author of How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism. 

But this transformation had a catch. While cars allowed shoppers to haul more goods home, inside the stores shoppers were still stuck carrying small hand baskets—limiting what they could carry and how much they could buy during a single visit. And Goldman, who owned the Standard Food Markets and Humpty Dumpty supermarket chains, saw the problem up close. “Women had a tendency to stop shopping when the baskets became too full or too heavy,” he observed.

Goldman was set on tackling the problem—though he was far from the first to attempt to do so. As early as the 1910s, Joseph Weingarten, the namesake behind the Texas grocery chain, provided wheeled carriers in which shoppers could place their baskets and push them around—though, as Warnes notes, hardly anyone did.

In the 1920s, Henry Henke and Camille Pillot outfitted their Houston store, Henke & Pillot, with a 15-inch-wide track raised about 30 inches off the floor, along which baskets equipped with tiny wheels could glide—a solution that removed the burden of carrying, but introduced new problems. Shoppers were forced to follow the track in full, often waiting behind slower customers, notes sociologist Catherine Grandclément.

At first, Goldman ordered supermarket employees to help shoppers who were struggling with carrying their groceries. “If there were some way we could give that customer two baskets to shop with and still have one hand free to shop,” Goldman later remarked, “we could do considerably more business.”

But he soon realized the cart was an essential addition, “a final piece of the jigsaw,” as Warnes puts it, allowing shoppers to pile up items without thinking about the weight.

“Goldman's real insight was not one of invention—humans had been using carts for millennia—but of timing; he seemed to realize that supermarkets had now grown so large, and car use so ubiquitous, that customers and retailers alike had no choice but to use these contraptions in order to make the whole system work,” says Warnes.

Goldman’s initial contraption, built with the help of Fred W. Young, a technically savvy employee, consisted of a basket mounted on a folding chair frame, with a lower rack for a second basket and wheels with front castors attached to each leg, allowing the rudimentary cart to pivot around store aisles. Though it did have some hiccups—the prototype was prone to folding up when it hit an obstacle and tipping over when rounding corners, notes Grandclément, Goldman filed a patent for the “Combination Basket and Carriage” on May 4, 1937. 

Never one to miss a marketing opportunity, Goldman placed an advertisement in the Oklahoma City Times on June 4, 1937, teasing the cart’s debut: “Can you imagine wending your way through a spacious food market without having to carry a cumbersome shopping basket on your arm? That’s what you’ll find at the Standard.” 

While the cart’s debut was met with heavy resistance—men found it emasculating, while women balked at pushing what they likened to another baby carriage—Goldman remained undeterred. The following week, he placed yet another (knowingly false) advertisement: “‘No Basket Carrying plan’ met with instant approval last week-end.”

He coupled the promotion with a clever ruse. “Goldman's masterstroke was to employ some actors, including, it seems, ‘manly bachelors,’ to use them around his store. This is where his real innovative contribution lay,” says Warnes.

Seeing others pushing the carts made shoppers more inclined to follow suit, and within weeks, Goldman’s carts were in use across all his stores. Then he set his sights even higher: In September 1937, Goldman debuted his cart at the first Super Market Convention and produced a promotional film aimed at supermarket managers. The cart’s cultural breakthrough came just three years later in August 1940, when a double-decker version, a facsimile of Goldman’s, appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post—a newly minted symbol of American consumer life.

As Goldman’s Folding Carrier Company grew into the nation’s largest cart manufacturer, Kansas City inventor Orla E. Watson introduced a new kind of telescoping cart in 1946, featuring two small but transformative changes. A swinging rear gate allowed carts to nest inside one another—saving valuable floor space—while a unified frame and basket turned them into permanent carts, unlike Goldman’s earlier models which required assembly before each use. 

Goldman quickly took notice, according to Grandclément. In October 1947, his company unveiled the “Nest-Baskart,” a design strikingly similar to Watson’s. Although Watson was the first to file a patent for the telescoping cart, Goldman submitted his own patent application two years later—and, more importantly, undercut Watson on pricing. As Watson struggled with production, the competitors eventually opted for an out-of-court settlement. In June 1949, Goldman was granted an exclusive license to manufacture the carts—except for three previously-issued licenses to smaller manufacturers—in exchange for paying royalties to Watson, who agreed to abandon his own plans to produce or market the carts.

The invention of the cart was “always a collaborative venture, begun by Weingarten and unknown others and continued by a range of innovators through the 20th century," says Warnes. But in the story of the shopping cart, it was marketing—not invention—that paid off, and Goldman who profited most.