The History of the Grocery Shopping Cart

How the Shopping Cart Has Evolved, and Where it is Headed

1937 was a monumental year for the carry-all shopping basket. On June 4, Sylvan Goldman introduced the first shopping cart to his Piggly-Wiggly grocery store, changing the way customers shopped for groceries, forever. The first shopping cart was a mixture of two wire baskets set atop a buggy-style cart. Shoppers were apprehensive at first, as the cart seemed almost too cumbersome to push around a store; most shoppers were plenty comfortable with baskets and even resisted the change. Still, Mr. Goldman managed to enticing his customers with his new idea, by using decoy shoppers to model the use of the cart. The concept took off, and Sylvan Goldman soon became a multimillionaire and legend.

As time passed by, the two-basket levels soon became just one large basket. Market research showed that shoppers purchased more when the size of the cart was bigger; only few people would use a cart and fill it with one to two items. Since many original grocery stores have narrow aisles, this was often a problem. However, as stores grew, so did the cart, and today’s average shopping cart is almost two times the capacity of the original. The telescoping cart, the carts that fit into each other for better storage and ease of use, were first manufactured 1947.