People hated shopping carts when they were invented in 1937.

Woman shopping in grocery store with cart

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, most Americans were just trying to get by, and few had the luxury of coming home from the grocery store with extra items. But that didn’t stop an Oklahoma grocer from coming up with the idea of a shopping cart, an invention that started out almost as disdained as it was practical.

The man behind the idea was Sylvan N. Goldman, owner of the Humpty Dumpty grocery chain. Interested in increasing his sales, he often paid close attention to how people shopped. One thing stood out: Customers would stop shopping once their handheld baskets got too heavy. Goldman started thinking: What if there were a way for shoppers to carry more with less effort? As an experiment, he took a folding chair, added wheels to the legs, and placed a basket on the seat. He then attached a platform between the chair’s supports to hold a second basket, creating a two-tiered cart that shoppers could push.

When he rolled out these new grocery carts in 1937, he expected a runaway hit, but the reaction wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. Women, already used to pushing strollers, weren’t eager to push another one at the store. Men, on the other hand, preferred not to push something stroller-like at all. To get people on board, Goldman got creative. He hired store greeters to hand shoppers a cart, and even paid actors to walk around shopping with them. Slowly, the idea caught on, and once it did, there was no going back.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

The first modern barcode scanned at a checkout was on a pack of Wrigley’s gum.

On June 26, 1974, the first UPC barcode — featuring the Universal Product Code used today — was scanned at a supermarket checkout. This took place at a grocery store in Troy, Ohio, and the item was a package of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. Barcodes had been in development for decades by this point — early designs included a bullseye — and that first successful scan was a high-tech milestone. However, the barcode had much more analog roots: It was first conceived of in the late 1940s as a drawing in the sand at a Miami beach. Despite these humble origins, barcodes marked the beginning of a retail revolution, making checkouts faster, improving inventory tracking, and paving the way for the modern supply chain.