A shopping cart (also called a trolley, carriage or buggy) is a cart supplied by a shop, especially a supermarket, for use by customers inside the shop for transport of merchandise to the check-out counter during shopping, and often to the customers car after paying as well. Often, customers are allowed to leave the carts in the parking lot, and store personnel, referred to as cart attendants, return the carts to the shop.
History
One of the first shopping carts were introduced on June 4, 1937, the invention of Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oklahoma City (another shopping-cart innovator was Orla Watson). One night, in 1936, Goldman sat in his office wondering how customers might move more groceries[citation needed]. He stared idly at a wooden folding chair. Put a basket on the seat and wheels on the legs. Goldman and one of his employees, Fred Young a mechanic, began tinkering. Their first shopping cart was a metal frame that held two wire baskets. Since they were inspired by the folding chair, Goldman called his carts "folding basket carriers". Another mechanic, Arthur Kosted, developed a method to mass produce the carts by inventing an assembly line capable of forming and welding the wire. The cart was awarded patent number 2,196,914 on April 9, 1940 (Filing date: March 14, 1938), titled, "Folding Basket Carriage for Self-Service Stores". They advertised the invention as part of a new “No Basket Carrying Plan."
The invention did not catch on immediately. Men found them effeminate; women found them suggestive of a baby carriage. "I have pushed my last baby buggy," an offended woman informed him. After hiring several male and female models to push his new invention around his store and demonstrate their utility, as well as greeters to explain their use, shopping carts became extremely popular and Goldman became a multimillionaire. Goldman continued to make modifications to his original design, and the basket size of the shopping cart increased as stores realized that their customers purchased more as its size increased. Today, most big-box stores and supermarkets have shopping carts for the convenience of the shoppers.
Recent studies[citation needed] determined that cartless retailers such as Sears and J.C. Penney have suffered slow sales in recent years. Retailers that do use shopping carts, Wal-Mart among them, have had booming sales. In large part this could be attributed to the ease of shopping made possible by the shopping cart.
There has been little progress in the design of shopping carts in the last decade. Recently researchers developed prototypes of computerized context aware shopping cart by attaching a Tablet PC to an ordinary cart. Initial field trails showed that the prototype and it is context-awareness provide an opportunity for enhancing and affecting the shopping experience.
