Oklahoma, the Sooner state, is noted for a few things — the parking meter was invented there, it was Indian Territory for some years before statehood, it’s the home of Will Rogers and Mickey Mantle and I grew up there.
But if that’s not enough, something we’ve come to accept as necessary and something that literally changed the way the world shops was conceived in Oklahoma using a simple folding chair.
In the late 1930s (1936, I think) Sylvan Goldman, like any good business man, was trying to find a way to increase sales. Goldman had two grocery store chains in Oklahoma City — Standard and Humpty Dumpty. (There were Humpty Dumpty stores in the area of Oklahoma that I grew up in — I don’t remember any “Standard” stores.) Anyhow, Goldman noticed that when the wire hand-held baskets his stores provided became full or heavy, most customers headed for the checkout. He figured the problem could be remedied if shoppers had a way to conveniently carry more items through the isles. Well, inspiration struck one evening while he was in his office pondering the problem. As the story goes, a simple wooden folding chair caught his eye. What if that chair had wheels on the bottom and a basket on the seat? Or — it might be even better if there were two baskets.
Goldman explained his idea to Fred Young, a carpenter and handyman that worked at the store. Young began tinkering and after many months and a quite a few prototypes, they hit upon a design they thought would work. (The original design was two metal folding chairs stacked on top of one another with wheels at the base of the legs to roll the cart around the store.)
The first carts used metal frames that each held two big baskets — 19 inches long, 13 inches wide and 9 inches deep. When not in use, the baskets could be removed and stacked together, and the frames folded up to a depth of only five inches — that preserved floor space, a precious commodity of any retail store.
The shopping cart was once called the “greatest development in the history of merchandising.” Interestingly enough, the shopping cart didn’t catch on right away. In order to generate interest and sway public opinion, Goldman took out newspaper ads, but they didn’t work. Most women’s reaction, was ‘no more carts for me. I’ve been pushing enough baby carriages. I don’t want to push any more.’ And the men said, ‘you mean with my big strong arms I can’t carry a darn little basket like that?’ The initial try to sell the idea was a complete flop. Kind of as a last resort, Goldman hired attractive men and women to walk around his stores pushing the shopping carts — that last ditch effort proved to be a stroke of genius. The carts became acceptable and his business went through the roof. It was so successful that he began selling the carts to other supermarket chains…. and by 1940, he had a seven-year waiting list.
While we’re on the subject, I guess now is as good a time as any to air one of the “little” things that irritate me the most. To return a shopping cart to the proper place in the store, or to a designated area in the parking lot is easy… and most of us recognize it as the correct and appropriate thing to do. I can’t think of any situation, with the possible exception of some kind of dire emergency, that a person should not be able to return their cart.
I think whether someone does, or doesn’t return their cart says a lot about a person. As far as I know, it isn’t illegal to leave a cart in the parking lot, on the sidewalk, in the aisle or up against some else’s car. So what a person does with the cart serves as a perfect example of whether that person will do what’s right without being forced to do it. Since there is no punishment for not returning a shopping cart, a person gains “nothing” by doing so. People return shopping carts because it’s the right thing to do. What a person does with a shopping cart is a good indication of whether that person is a good or bad member of society.
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