THE TOOTHBRUSH HOLDer. The dust cloth. The doorstop. The shopping cart.
There are countless items around us that are so commonplace and obvious in their utility that the idea of somebody once having had to invent them would seem ludicrous. If you need something on which to hang a toothbrush, it doesn`t take the mind of Thomas Alva Edison to devise a toothbrush holder. If you need something to dust off your tabletops, any old piece of cloth will likely do just fine as a dust rag. A wedge of wood or rubber is the classic device to hold a door open, but obviously any heavy object will do the job.
And if you`re going to a grocery store to buy a week`s worth of provisions for a family of four, you will likely need a conveyance inside the store to carry all those heavy cans and containers. That`s easy. Just open a folding chair, attach wheels to each of the four legs, slap a large basket on the chair seat and start chucking in all those cans and containers.
Well . . . on second thought, maybe the supermarket shopping cart, certainly nearly as ubiquitous as the toothbrush holder, dust rag and doorstop, isn`t quite so simple a concept. First introduced to the grocery business in 1937, it was an invention that spread like the proverbial wildfire, transforming within a few years the way groceries are marketed and purchased in America. It went on to become the basis of other mass-marketing innovations, most notably the huge discount department, drug and toy stores where people go to save money.
It is, in short, a sort of symbol of 20th Century American consumerism and all the excesses that it implies. The cart has had a subtle but definite impact on the way we live and shop.
The expensive, enticingly packaged, precooked, time- and labor-saving convenience foods that most of us pile into our grocery carts are in some measure an outgrowth of the cart itself. The aisles of the typical supermarket are a monument to American marketing, carefully thought out and artfully laid out to produce maximum sales. The products on the shelves beg, implore, promise and seduce. Buy me. Try me. Save. Save. Save.
PARENTS ON A PRE-Christmas shopping expedition, wheeling a shopping cart around in a large discount toy outlet, cannot but feel a little sheepish in the midst of such material gluttony. The store makes it easy to get the shopping done in one gargantuan fling through aisle upon aisle of preteen wish fulfillment. One-stop-shopping convenience. Low prices on popular brand names. Save. Save. Save. The cart soon fills to overflowing with objects that will, on Christmas morning, satiate the television-inspired, wanton greed of little ones.
Shopping carts, albeit purloined ones, even figure into the symbolism of the nation`s have-not population. It has become the conveyance of choice for urban bag ladies and free-lance aluminum-can recyclers.
That is a considerable track record for such a humble vehicle, one that was inspired by and first constructed out of a folding chair. And the man behind it, though no Thomas Alva Edison, was something of a visionary whose name is now inscribed in the Inventors Hall of Fame.
Sylvan Goldman, born in 1898 in Oklahoma Indian territory, was raised in the milieu of frontier merchants in Texas and Oklahoma. By the time he was 28, he and an older brother, Alfred, opened their first grocery store, in Tulsa. It was a time when Americans were trading their horses and buggies for automobiles. It was also when the grocery industry was taking its early, shaky steps from being a neighborly, essentially small business enterprise to the mass-merchandising enterprise it is today.
The Goldmans` first store was typical of the earlier, more genteel
”service” grocery stores that most Americans frequented in those days.
”Service” meant the customer rarely touched a product; the customer simply handed a clerk a list of items. The clerk would move through the store, collecting the items. A produce clerk would collect and bag the fresh fruit and vegetables the customer wanted, as would a dairy clerk at the dairy counter and a butcher at the meat counter.
The collected goods would be assembled at a checkout desk, where another clerk would pluck a stubby pencil from behind his ear and total up the bill on a brown paper bag. If need be, a clerk would also deliver the groceries, gratis.
It was a convenient arrangement for work-harried housewives when indoor plumbing, washing machines, kitchen ranges, refrigerators and other labor-saving appliances still were rare. Women, as they do now, did the bulk of the family food shopping, but going to the grocery then was as much a social release as it was a chore. It gave women the chance to walk away from household drudgery for a precious hour or two and visit with neighbors and friends.
But given the expense of employing so many clerks, it also kept the price of groceries relatively high. Regional and national chain stores such as A&P, Kroger, Safeway and Piggly Wiggly already were making big inroads against small, independent local grocers. The chains didn`t provide the personalized service of the local owners, but they supplied something very appealing-lower prices.
The chains could lower their prices in part because they purchased their goods wholesale, on a centralized basis, in massive quantities and at costs below those of independents. But the real savings came through what became known as ”self-service” stores. At the entrance of the self-service store was a large bin containing straw or steel-mesh baskets. Thus equipped, customers roamed the store to select items from the shelves themselves. By making the customers do what clerks once did, the clerks became unnecessary, and the stores eliminated considerable overhead.
Within a year of opening their first store, the Goldman brothers found themselves owning a 15-store chain in the Tulsa area. Most were old-fashioned stores that the brothers quickly turned into self-service operations. A year later, the chain included 50 stores in Oklahoma, and just one more year later, they sold out, at a handsome profit, to an even larger chain.
Though still barely in their 30s, the two brothers were wealthy men early in 1929, but their good fortune lasted only a few months. The stock-market crash came in October of that year, and with the ensuing Depression, their paper profits were nearly worthless. Because of a contractual obligation that did not allow them to start up stores in any town in which their old chain operated, they moved late in 1929 to Oklahoma City, where they had never done business before. There they scraped together enough money to start yet another grocery operation.
Again they started small, opening a single, 1,250-square-foot store on a busy city thoroughfare with no parking lot but with free delivery. But, as before, they expanded rapidly, buying up stores throughout the city and suburbs, adapting to every innovation. By 1934, they opened their first
”supermarket” (a term whose originator remains anonymous) in an Oklahoma City suburb. By today`s standards of stores with 20,000 to 40,000 square feet, it was small, boasting only 7,000 square feet. But it had a parking lot and, being completely self-service, had lower prices, no small consideration for grocery shoppers in the Depression.
Indeed it was the grocers who could most effectively reduce prices who survived and thrived in the 1930s. The cutthroat competition spurred by the Depression in fact led directly to Sylvan Goldman`s invention.
By 1936, Goldman, though he had been forced to quit school and work after 8th grade, was a keen and informed observer of shopping habits. Watching housewives come into his self-service stores and pick up straw baskets to collect family grocery purchases, he discovered a severe limitation to the volume of sales he could expect from them.
”I used to own two chains of grocery stores-Standard Food Markets and Humpty Dumpty Stores,” Goldman wrote in a monograph for the Department of Cultural History of the Smithsonian Institution several years before his death in 1984. ”In watching customers carrying baskets on their arms shopping for groceries, the thought came to me that if there were some way we could give that customer two baskets to shop with and still have one hand free to shop, we could do considerably more business because usually when the housewife got her basket full, it was heavy for her to carry, and she would stop shopping.” Retiring to his office one night in 1936 to do some paperwork, his eyes rested on a couple of folding chairs he used for conferences with employees and visiting salesmen.
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”I had the thought . . . that if I would put wheels on the bottom of those folding chairs, raise the seats some so I could have room to put another rack at the bottom of the chair so this rack could hold another shopping basket and let the back upright of the chair be the handle of the basket carrier, this could be shopping in ease with two baskets.”
VOILA!
The next day Goldman called in one of his maintenance men and outlined his idea. Together they tinkered with the design and built several prototypes over the next few months. Finally satisfied with one model, Goldman introduced the carts in June 1937. Customers at first treated the carts as little more than a promotional novelty and ignored them. But within a few weeks, their obvious utility became apparent, and people used them as a matter of course.
EVEN AS HE WAS INTROducing the carts in his own stores, Sylvan Goldman was gearing up a manufacturing plant to make them for stores throughout the country, hiring a cousin as a national sales rep before the year was out.
(Sylvan`s brother, Alfred, had become ill with pneumonia and died in 1937 while traveling on a cruise ship.) He continued to tinker with the cart`s design, too, adding the now-obligatory baby seats to them by 1938.
The carts caught on quickly, spreading from coast to coast and spawning rival manufacturers. In fact, the cart became such a fixture on the national consciousness that the cover of the Aug. 31, 1940, Saturday Evening Post sported a humorous illustration featuring a shopping cart. It depicts a toddler riding in the lower basket of one of Goldman`s carts, innocently grabbing for a bag of cookies from a ”serve yourself” floor display with one hand, while, with the other, he is busily eating a banana he has obviously pulled from another display.
The illustrator`s rendition, done barely three years after the cart`s debut, is rather uncanny in its humorous observations. The cart, as Goldman surmised, indeed did have the effect of getting people to buy more. What he didn`t foresee, however, was the effect the cart would have on the way people bought groceries and on what they bought.
”The shopping cart is the key element in self-service, mass retail merchandising,” says Gene von Stein, vice president of Unarco, an Oklahoma City cart manufacturer that is the largest in the world. It`s also the company Goldman founded in 1937; it is now owned and operated as a subsidiary of Chicago-based UNR Industries, Inc., a metals manufacturing conglomerate.
The 1940 Saturday Evening Post cover, whether its artist did it intentionally or not, captured the essence of impulse buying. The toddler was doing then what every supermarket manager knows toddlers still do today. He was attracted to and snatched up well-displayed merchandise, whether or not it was on his mother`s shopping list.
As it turns out, mothers and fathers themselves are just as prone to such seductions. The average, 30,000-square-foot supermarket today displays more than 10,000 items. The average shopper, pushing a cart, goes in with a list but also leisurely perambulates through these displays, filling up the cart not only with staples but with impulse items because a display or a price offer struck the shopper`s fancy. Often these are higher-markup items, accounting for the very slight .71 per cent profit margin with which the grocery business operates today.
Goldman`s cartmaking enterprise became an even bigger part of his business interests during World War II. Many full-service groceries began to convert to self-service stores using the carts when their clerks traded their aprons for military uniforms. It was a trend that never stopped. The postwar Baby Boom fed the suburban building boom. Shopping strips, built with vast parking lots, replaced Main Streets.
Most suburban shopping strips of any consequence were anchored by at least one major supermarket. The supermarkets grew in numbers, and they grew in size as Americans abandoned crowded city neighborhoods and corner groceries for their suburban yards and suburban mobility afforded by the family car. In 1940, 10 percent of the nation`s groceries were sold in self-service supermarkets. By 1950, that had grown to 30 percent, then 60 percent in 1955 and 70 percent in 1959, a figure that roughly holds true today.
Naturally the cart was indispensable in the ever-bigger supermarkets, and it also became a useful adjunct in many other mass-merchandising stores that began to appear on the suburban scene.
Goldman`s manufacturing company happily expanded to accommodate the growing demand for his folding chair on wheels. Ever the innovator, Goldman oversaw its redesign shortly after the war to what it remains essentially today-the tubular, chromium-plated cart with a flipup back that allows the carts to ”nest” compactly inside each other in long lines when not in use. Goldman innovated other commercial carts as well, particularly labor-saving carts specifically designed for grocery stockboys.
Perhaps his most famous shopping-cart offshoot, however, was a luggage carrier designed to allow train passengers to negotiate their own heavy suitcases through busy train terminals. A strike by luggage-handling red caps protesting the carts in Chicago`s Santa Fe railway terminal in 1954 nearly made the invention still-born, scaring off other railway companies from purchasing them. But the then-ascendant airline industry, seeing a good thing, quickly snapped up the idea, thus popularizing the airport luggage cart.
GOLDMAN`S BUSINESS acumen, both as a grocer and as an inventor, made him a rich man. He sold his interests in the grocery business in the 1950s and his cart-manufacturing business in 1961. Before he died, he switched to real estate and made even more money, giving away much of it as a beloved philanthropist in Oklahoma. Still, he left a fortune reputed to be worth $400 million today.
His cart company, operating under its Chicago owners, still thrives. The carts, selling at a rate of about a million a year, cost approximately $80 to $100 each and last about six years. Six American companies make the carts, but Goldman`s old company, Unarco, sells more than the other five combined. And, as befits an industry leader, it continues to innovate.
At a gathering of the nation`s grocers at the annual Food Marketing Institute convention in Chicago last year, Unarco plumped its newest wrinkle on cart design. Each cart sports a computerized display screen that is electronically linked to sensors installed in the ceilings of the supermarkets using them. As a customer pushes the cart through the aisles, the advertising message constantly changes, extolling the virtues of specific products as he passes by them.
That feature, in itself, might make a merchandiser drool. But that is only the secondary feature of the device. The primary feature is that, while the ceiling sensor is giving out advertising commands to the cart`s computer-display screen, it is also monitoring and recording the cart`s progress. It feeds into a central computer such data as: where the cart went and at what time of the day; how long it stayed in each section, such as the boxed cereal section; and how long it stayed in front of special merchandising displays.
The supermarket today is the nexus of American consumerism. It is estimated that more than 60 percent of the products advertised on American television are for sale in the supermarket, be it food products, health and beauty aids, cleaning aids and utensils, soft drinks or alcoholic beverages. Which aisle in the supermarket those products are placed, the shelf space alloted to each and the manner in which they are displayed are of crucial interest to product manufacturers.
Unarco thinks the food industry is ripe for its computer-age cart, which is described in high-tech jargon that seems more appropriate to a space ship than a grocery. The company calls the system ”promotronics.” Each cart sports a solar-energy microprocessor that displays the advertising and feeds the cart-movement data into something billed as the ”Systech Infoboard.”
Manufacturers and distributors for years have been paying supermarkets
”slotting” fees for special placement of their products in the stores, especially when they are trying to capture the buying public`s attention with a new product. Unarco`s Von Stein says the art of placement largely always has been one of guesswork.
”Where a product is best displayed to maximize its sales always has been based on speculation based on unreliable observers hired to monitor this,”
Von Stein says. ”Promotronics with Infoboard can track the customer`s complete shopping trip and provide the significant data . . . that`s needed in today`s computerized shelf-space management and programs for effective product placement, store layout, new item promotion and special displays.”
Sylvan Goldman, whose casual observations of the effect of heavy shopping baskets on buying patterns of the American housewife prompted the shopping cart, probably would appreciate Unarco`s innovation. Anything that pierces ever more deeply into the psyche of the American consumer, yielding ever more practical knowledge of what we like to buy and why, would certainly appeal to such a practical man.