Who Invented the Shopping Cart? The Surprisingly Dramatic Story

The problem: heavy baskets

In the 1930s, grocery shoppers carried hand baskets. Goldman noticed that when a basket got full or heavy, people simply stopped shopping and headed to the register. For a grocery store owner, that's a nightmare. Every heavy basket was money walking out the door.

The idea came from a folding chair

As the story goes, Goldman got his idea from a folding chair in his office. He and a mechanic worked on putting wheels on the legs and baskets on the seat. The result was a rolling frame that could hold two baskets, and it folded up when you were done.

It was simple, practical and, as it turned out, deeply uncool.

Shoppers wanted nothing to do with it

When the carts first appeared, many shoppers avoided them. Some men reportedly felt that pushing a cart made them look weak, and some women said it reminded them too much of pushing a baby carriage. The carts sat there, rolling nowhere.

So he hired people to pretend

Goldman's solution was pure marketing genius: he hired people to push carts around his stores and act like regular shoppers. Once real customers saw everyone else using them, the carts caught on. It was basically the first influencer campaign, but with more wheels.

Goldman went on to make a fortune manufacturing carts, which proves that a good idea plus a little peer pressure can go a long way.

Then came the nesting cart

Goldman's early carts had to be folded and stored. The carts that slide into each other in a long line came later, from an inventor named Orla Watson, who patented his telescoping design in the 1940s. That's the design you still wrestle out of the cart corral today.

And the wobbly wheel?

Sadly, history doesn't tell us who invented the one cart with the squeaky, wobbly wheel that you always seem to pick. Some mysteries are meant to stay unsolved.