The origin story of the shopping cart
The history is the beginning of the 20th century... In the markets, people carry the products they buy from the shelves. If they want to buy more products, they can barely walk to the market, hugging them, and as a result, they return home without getting everything on their minds.
If they are lucky, they can find shopping baskets in some markets, but they still cannot get the efficiency they want because it is difficult to carry the baskets.
Until then, it's not such a big deal. Because not everyone has a home type cooler to buy a lot of products and store them in the refrigerator. However, after 1914, household refrigerators - today's refrigerators - are invented and as time progresses, these refrigerators begin to enter every home. Now people can buy more items at once and store them safely in their homes. However, buying more products during grocery shopping is not a good option since they cannot carry it in their hands.
At this point, Oklahoma businessperson Sylvan Goldman comes into play. Goldman, which was engaged in wholesale product sales at first and then established one of the first supermarket chains that made a lot of noise at that time, accelerates retail sales. Sylvan Goldman, who started to think of ideas that could both increase his own sales and satisfy his customers, follows the shopping behaviors of customers for a while and realizes that women with children have difficulties while shopping. On the one hand, while trying to take care of their children, on the other hand, the idea of a shopping trolley arises when I see women trying to put all the materials that the house needs in a small shopping basket and to carry that increasingly heavy basket.
However, he also considers the fact that shopping carts that will be specially prepared for customers will take up a lot of space in the market, and he starts to think about the design of this special shopping cart. First, the wheeled versions of the shopping carts they currently use are prepared. However, the problem of taking up space is not solved, and the size of the baskets is not much, so this invention is considered insufficient. After many such designs were made, the first useful shopping cart was introduced in 1937. These shopping carts, designed by Goldman with the help of a mechanic named Fred Young, are inspired by foldable wooden chairs and do not take up too much space for the market, as they can be intertwined when customers are not using them.
The shopping carts, which were introduced to customers with a motto such as "Stop Carrying Baskets" on June 4, 1937, do not attract as much attention as was initially thought, but on the contrary, they receive negative reactions. Men think that this invention is for women, and they continue to carry all the products they buy in order to prove that they can carry all the heavy loads at once. Women, on the other hand, think that the shopping cart is no different from a baby carriage and that it will not make their job any easier, and they refuse to use it at the very beginning.
After these thoughts of its customers, Goldman does not give up even though it is disappointed and takes the move to reverse these thoughts. He gets on with a few "strong" looking male and female models, similar to men who think just like that, and allows these models to happily stroll around their markets with their shopping carts all day long.
Real customers, who see the models happily using their shopping carts, start to buy their shopping carts with peace of mind, and these shopping carts become widespread in a short time. Here are the grocery carts, which have survived to the present day and have many different designs since then, but basically answering the same need, they are invented and become widespread at the end of such a process.