The history of the supermarket and the shopping cart

Today you walk into a supermarket, grab a cart, roll down the aisles, pick up what you want, and pay at the end. It seems like the most natural thing in the world. But a little over a hundred years ago, buying food was completely different: you handed a list to a clerk behind a counter, he went to fetch each product from the shelves, brought it back, weighed it, wrapped it. You just waited. You touched nothing. That experience, which lasted for centuries, changed completely thanks to two ideas that seemed strange at first.

1916: the day the customer could touch the merchandise

In the fall of 1916, in Memphis, Tennessee, a merchant named Clarence Saunders opened a store with an odd name: Piggly Wiggly. His idea was revolutionary in its simplicity: instead of asking a clerk for everything, the customer walked in, grabbed a basket, and served themselves, roaming the aisles and choosing from the products in plain view. Saunders patented this self-service concept.

The change was not only about convenience. By letting people roam the shelves, customers picked up not just what they came for, but also what caught their eye along the way. Shopping stopped being a transaction directed by an employee and became a stroll. Without knowing it, Saunders had invented a big part of modern retail.

Before, the customer handed over a list and the clerk fetched the products. At Piggly Wiggly, people were free to roam the aisles and pick out what they needed or what caught their eye.

A new problem: full hands

Self-service brought a problem nobody had faced before. Since each customer now carried their own basket, there was a very physical limit to how much they could buy: the weight their arms could bear. At his Humpty Dumpty supermarkets in Oklahoma City, owner Sylvan Goldman noticed something worth money. As soon as the hand basket got too heavy, customers stopped shopping and headed to pay, even when they would have wanted to take more.

Goldman also noticed that many women struggled with self-service because they had to handle both the basket and their children at the same time. The problem was clear: full hands were holding back sales. The solution did not yet exist.

1937: the cart nobody wanted to push

On June 4, 1937, Goldman introduced his invention in his Oklahoma City stores. Working with a mechanic named Fred Young, he took inspiration from a wooden folding chair: he gave it a metal frame, wheels, and two wire baskets, one above the other. He called it, according to the patent he would later receive, a 'folding basket carriage for self-service stores'. At last, the customer could carry much more without getting tired.

And here comes the part almost nobody tells: the cart flopped at first. People did not want to use it. Men found it too effeminate, like pushing something instead of carrying with strength; women said it looked like a baby carriage and that they pushed enough of those already. The great invention sat there, untouched.

The trick that made people accept it

Goldman did not give up, and he did something brilliant. He hired men and women, models, to roam his store pushing the carts as if they were ordinary customers, and he placed greeters at the entrance to explain how they worked. When real customers saw others using them naturally, the embarrassment vanished. The cart became normal, then essential, and today it is impossible to imagine a supermarket without it.

• 1916: Clarence Saunders opens the first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis and invents self-service.
• 1937: Sylvan Goldman introduces the first cart in his Humpty Dumpty stores in Oklahoma City.
• 1940: Goldman receives the patent for the 'folding basket carriage for self-service stores'.
• The cart flopped at first out of embarrassment, not design; it caught on when people saw others using it.

What a business can learn from this

There are two lessons that span more than a century. The first: making things easier for the customer almost always makes them buy more. Saunders let people serve themselves and Goldman took the weight off their arms; both removed a friction and sales went up. The second is subtler. A good invention is not enough if people feel strange using it. The cart succeeded when it stopped being embarrassing, not when its design improved. Any novelty you offer your customers, however good, needs someone to make it feel normal and easy.

To keep the essentials: the modern supermarket was born from two ideas that seemed strange at first. In 1916 Clarence Saunders let the customer touch the merchandise, and in 1937 Sylvan Goldman put wheels on his basket. Both removed a friction and, along the way, changed forever the way the whole world shops.

Sources

• Wikipedia (Sylvan Goldman) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvan_Goldman
• Help Scout — https://www.helpscout.com/blog/first-shopping-cart/
• TIME — https://time.com/4480303/supermarkets-history/
• America Comes Alive — https://americacomesalive.com/who-invented-the-shopping-cart/
• Stacker — https://stacker.com/stories/business-economy/history-supermarket-industry-america