thetic and uncomfortable to maneu- ver, while men saw it as a confession of lack of strength. Goldman was not discouraged and resorted instead to a clever marketing trick. According to CNN, he hired several women and men to walk around his supermarket with the carts, showing that they were shopping and demonstrating their usefulness, while a person at the entrance of the store suggested to the rest of the customers that they should also take a cart. Now the invention worked. And realizing that the business could be very profitable, Goldman patented his invention. Little by little, the shopping cart conquered every corner of the United
States, and other supermarkets began to ask him to sell them shop- ping carts. This led to Goldman in 1947 creating his own shopping cart factory: “Folding Carrier,” which had a waiting list of more than two years and made him a multimillionaire. By 1950, just three years after their introduction, grocery carts had become so popular that stores in the United States began to be designed with them in mind, with more spacious aisles and cash registers to handle large quantities of food. The original cart got many improvements over the years, such as the “flip-up door” to fit one cart with the next, and the integrat- ed child seat, which were Gold- man’s own ideas. Its design has not
changed much since then, and is likely to change very little in the future. The grocery cart changed the world and impacted the lives of everyone. Its invention has spawned countless ideas that have turned retail into one of the biggest busi- nesses in the world. Today, in the United States alone, there are more than 35 million shopping carts, and more than 1 million are manufac- tured each year. Goldman looked for a need and tried to fill it. He changed the way we shop forever — with an invention that no one wanted to use and that was not made for the convenience of shoppers, but to make shopping more convenient.
Vision Magazine 69
December 2022
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