The Man Who Invented the Shopping Cart and Watched Nobody Use It.

Oklahoma City. June 4, 1937. A Friday.

The newspaper ad ran that day, in the Oklahoma City Times. 

Can you imagine wending your way through a spacious food market without having to carry a cumbersome shopping basket on your arm?

He had the new carts waiting in his stores. He was excited. This was his breakthrough moment. The culmination of all of his work. 

He was excited to see the public finally get their hands on it.

Forty years later he would still remember his disappointment. In a video interview with Charles Kuralt you can see the raw emotion he experienced the next morning as he prepared to change the way shoppers bought their groceries.

He was expecting people to be lined up outside. A magnetic buzz in the air as people used his new innovation. That curious contagion where one person excitedly shares something new and fascinating with those around them.

There was none of that. The store was open. No buzz. No curiosity. No one using a shopping cart. 

"I went down to our largest store, and when I got there there was ample room for me to come in. There were people shopping. Not a one was using a cart."

Ample room. Read that again. A man who had bet his name on a waiting crowd walked into an empty doorway.

I keep thinking about his walk from the entrance to the first aisle. Shoppers on every side of him. Baskets hanging off arms. And his carts sitting there like furniture nobody wanted to sit on.

I don't know what he did with his hands in that moment. I know what I'd have done with mine.

Sylvan Nathan Goldman was born on November 15, 1898, in Ardmore, which was Indian Territory then. Oklahoma wasn't a state yet. It wouldn't be for another 8 years, so he spent the first part of his childhood in a place that officially didn't exist.

The family ran dry goods stores, and Sylvan grew up inside them. 

Here's the part I like. Nobody sat him down and taught him retail. He didn't get an MBA from Harvard or intern at McKinsey. He soaked up knowledge the way a kid picks up a language, one customer at a time. 

He saw it all firsthand. He lived it. Who hesitates at the price. Who walks out. Who comes back.

Home from the war, he and his older brother Alfred opened Goldman Brothers Wholesale Fruits and Produce in Breckenridge, Texas. It was an oil boom town. Money was falling out of the sky and every restaurant and store needed produce yesterday.

Then the boom cooled off, and the business cooled with it. Sources are thin on exactly how bad it got, and the dates don't line up cleanly, so I won't pretend I know the day the doors closed. What I can say is that he and Alfred ended up in California, working for grocery wholesalers. Bankrupt. Employees again. After owning something.

That's a particular kind of humbling. You've had a sign with your name on it, and now you're learning your way around someone else's warehouse.

But California was where the future was, and the brothers noticed it. A new kind of store was showing up. Everything under one roof. Meat, produce, canned goods. No clerk in a white apron pulling things off a shelf for you. You walked in, picked things up yourself, and paid a cashier on the way out.

They wanted in. They were about to open their own wholesale business when their uncles called from Oklahoma. The uncles wanted to build a retail food chain, and they'd put up the money. 

Sylvan said “Yes” and a new adventure began.

On April 3, 1920, the first Sun Grocery opened in Tulsa, on East Fifteenth Street. A year later there were 21 locations across Oklahoma.

He was 21 years old.

In 1929 the brothers sold Sun to Skaggs-Safeway. The timing looked like genius, because the market cracked a few months later.

It wasn't, quite. 

According to some people who remember his story, they lost most of the money they'd just made in that crash, and that a non-compete in the Safeway deal kept them out of Tulsa. If that's right, they were 30-ish, mostly cleaned out for a second time, and locked out of the one city where they knew everyone.

So they moved to Oklahoma City, bought 5 grocery stores, and called the new company Standard. In 1934, with the Depression grinding other grocers into dust, he bought the failing Humpty Dumpty chain and turned it around with aggressive advertising and by treating his employees better than most bosses of that era did.

Every time the floor dropped out, he didn't ask for a different situation or blame the people around him. He found something he could do next.

Now it's 1936, and Sylvan is running two chains in the middle of the Depression, and he can't stop looking at one small thing.

Customers stopped shopping.

Not because they ran out of money. Not because the shelves were empty. They stopped because the basket they were carrying got heavy. A woman would fill it halfway, shift it to her other arm, fill it a little more, and then you could see it happen on her face. She was done. She walked to the register with what she had and left everything else on the shelf.

"They had a tendency to stop shopping when the baskets became too full or too heavy," he said, in a line the New York Times later quoted in his obituary.

Think about that from his side of the counter. The stores were built to make people buy more than they planned to. Wide aisles. Big displays. And the whole machine was being throttled by a wire basket and the shopper's tired forearm.

Others had tried to fix it. 

In Houston, a store had put a raised track along the floor so baskets could roll on little wheels. Shoppers had to follow the track the whole way, stuck behind whoever was slowest. It solved one problem and built another.

Here's the moment that's gotten most of the retellings. One evening, up in his office, Sylvan grabbed a folding chair.

I like that it's that ordinary. A chair. He sat there folding it and unfolding it, watching how the legs hinged in the middle, how it held weight and then disappeared. 

He looked at the chair and saw a grocery cart.

He took the idea to Fred Young, a mechanic who worked for the chain. They built it in what Kuralt would later call a "ramshackle carpentry shop." Wheels on the four feet of the chair. A basket on the seat. A platform between the legs for a second basket below. Two baskets, one hand free.

It was clumsy. The early version could fold up on itself if it hit something, and it tipped when you took a corner too fast. So they rebuilt it. And rebuilt it again. Each time making it the perfect innovation for his grocery empire.

They filed for a patent on May 4, 1937, for what the paperwork called a "Combination Basket and Carriage."

That was the part he controlled. The idea. The chair. The shop. The rebuilds. The paperwork.

Then came June 4.

So he's standing in his own store, and nobody is touching the carts.

Imagine being the guy who built them. His brother Alfred had died that same year. I can't tell you how much that weighed on him, because nobody I've read tells us. I can tell you that he had lost his partner of every business venture since 1919, and this cart was the first thing he'd taken on by himself. Just him. This was his idea.

And now the public was shrugging at it. Ignoring it. Not even pretending to take interest. 

The reasons came fast. Women, the story goes, told him "I've pushed my last baby buggy." They had spent years steering strollers through the house and the street, and here was a metal contraption with a handle that felt exactly the same in their hands. 

They were done with that chapter. They did not want it back in the produce aisle.

The men, by the accounts, had their own version. A man with a basket on his arm looked like a man who could carry things. Pushing a cart looked like admitting you couldn't. It wasn't tough. Or manly. And they wouldn't touch it.

Look at what Goldman had just run into. The product worked. It was lighter than a basket, it held more, and every rational argument was on his side. And not one of those arguments had anything to do with why people weren't using it.

What he couldn't control was pride. You can't change what a stranger thinks it says about him to be seen pushing a cart.

Now watch what he did with the part he could control.

The following week he ran another ad. 

"No Basket Carrying plan" met with instant approval last week-end.

That was false. He knew it. Forty years later, Kuralt held up the old ad and read the claim back to him, that shoppers had come and seen and said it's a wow, and Goldman laughed and said, "No, no. That's a big lie."

I love that he just admits it. No spin. A man in his late 70's, with a TV crew in the room, calling his own advertisement a lie.

Here's how he fixed it, in his own telling to Kuralt.

For each store, he hired 3 people. A young woman in her late twenties, another woman in her forties, and a third shopper in her late fifties. He had them shop near the entrance. With carts. As if they'd been doing it all their lives.

"When they see the ones that were walking around using them," he said, "they start using them. And immediately it became a huge success."

The word the interviewer used was "shills." Goldman agreed. "That's right. Exactly what it was."

Other accounts say there were also younger, good-looking men and women pushing carts, and a greeter at the door whose whole job was to offer you one and point at everybody else using theirs. 

He didn't argue with the shoppers. He didn't explain the cart. He didn't lecture anyone about their pride. He made it safe. He put people in the aisle who looked like them and let the crowd watch them push a cart and not get hurt.

He didn't force anyone across the river. He waded in first and made the water look fun.

By the fall of 1937, the carpentry shop had become the Folding Basket Carrier Company. He showed off the cart at the first Super Market Convention that September, and made a promotional film for store managers. A baby seat came within a year, because mothers were his best customers. In August 1940 a double-decker cart appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

In three years he had gone from an empty doorway to a magazine cover.

You'd think that's the end. It's not. Because the cart that Goldman built had a flaw, and somebody else saw it.

His carts had to be set up in the store each time and taken apart again. A man in Kansas City named Orla Watson figured out how to fix it. In 1946 Watson came up with a cart that had a swinging rear gate, so the carts could slide into each other, nesting, and stay assembled. That's the cart you know. That's every cart in every parking lot.

Goldman noticed. In October 1947 his company introduced a nesting cart of its own, remarkably similar to Watson's. Watson had filed his patent first. Goldman filed his own two years after that and undercut Watson on price while Watson was struggling to manufacture.

Then lawyers got involved, as lawyers do. In June 1949 they settled. Goldman's company got an exclusive license to make the nesting cart, with a few small exceptions. In return he paid Watson royalties, and Watson agreed to give up making them himself.

I'll be honest: I don't love this part of the story, and I don't think I'm supposed to. It's the messy part where the inventor is also the guy who showed up with a bigger factory. And was a bit of a bully. 

Historian Andrew Warnes puts it plainly: the shopping cart was "always a collaborative venture," and the one who profited most was the one who sold it, not the one who built it first.

He did get rich. Everyone agrees on that part. He collected a royalty on every folding‑cart in the country until the patent ran out 16 years later. He also invented the grocery sacker, the folding inter-office basket carrier, a milk bottle rack, and the baggage cart you still see at every airport.

How much, exactly? I went looking for a number I could trust, and I didn't find one. Whatever you've seen online about his fortune, treat it as a guess.

What I did find is the scene Kuralt wrote about in 1977, and it tells you more than a number would.

Up the elevator in the Citizens Tower in Oklahoma City, to the 18th floor. Past a bust of Sylvan N. Goldman in the hall. Down the carpet toward a beautiful receptionist, and into the corner office, where the great man is on the phone. Kuralt walks in on the middle of a conversation about money. Something about the twenty-five thousand he wants.

On the walls, cartoons. All joking about the cart. The Newton of the A&P, Kuralt called him. The Edison of the Kmart.

Kuralt asked the obvious question. Was it the shopping cart that made you rich?

"Well," Goldman said, "they didn't make me poor."

Out the window, the whole city.

And the rest of the money went here: He gave works of art to Oklahoma institutions. He gave time and money to a center at the University of Oklahoma that works on bridging Christians and Jews. In 1950 the Pawnee made him an honorary chief. He gave $1.5 million toward a center for the Oklahoma Blood Institute, and the center carries his name.

I wish I had a better story about a yacht. I don't. The paper trail says an Oklahoma grocer with an eighth-grade education who kept a bust of himself in the hallway, laughed at his own lies, and spent a great deal of what he made on art, blood, and the project of getting different kinds of people into the same room.

His wife, Margaret, "Babe" to everyone, died in November 1984, after fifty-three years of marriage. They buried her on a Wednesday.

Sylvan died the following Sunday, November 25, at home in Nichols Hills, eleven days after his eighty-sixth birthday.

One week.

I don't know what to make of that, and I'm not going to tell you what it means. I'll just say that a man who spent his whole life on carrying weight faster and farther left the world right behind the person he'd been carrying it with.

His family commissioned a bronze statue the next year. It stands at Science Museum Oklahoma. Sylvan beside a shopping cart, and in the cart, cast in bronze, a milk carton, an egg box, celery, and a box of cereal.

The curator pointed out one more thing, and it stuck with me. They chose the nesting cart for the statue. Not his folding original. The one that, in the end, he'd had to license.

At the end of that interview, Kuralt asked him what the country would look like if he'd never invented the cart.

"Oh, I'll tell you," said Goldman, "it'd be just like it is now. Because somebody else would have."

Honest, and a little deflating. And I think he's right.

He wasn't the first to put wheels under a basket. He wasn't the last to improve it. By his own account he wasn't even right about the launch. It would have happened without him, and he says so out loud, on camera, forty years later.

So the cart was never the thing worth copying.

Here's what he walked into that Friday morning. His brother was four months in the ground. Two fortunes already gone. An eighth-grade education and a grocery chain he'd built out of somebody else's money. And a product he had made with his own hands, sitting in the aisle, being refused by the exact people it was built for.

There were so many things that were was outside of his control. The oil bust. The crash. The clause in the contract. What a woman felt when she put her hands on a handle that reminded her of a stroller. What a man thought it said about him to be seen pushing instead of carrying.

He couldn't impact any of it.

What he could impact required much more focus. The ad he ran the next week. The three people he put in the aisle. The store he walked into at 6am, before anyone else got there.

So he worked the small part. He put models in the aisle and let strangers watch other strangers push a cart and not get hurt. 

Then he did it again the next morning. And the morning after that.

That's the whole strategy. You don't get to choose community pride, the oil crash, or the brother who passes away. You get to choose what happens in your own stores by noon on Monday.

I've been to that doorway. Different store. Different decade. Same empty room. Same carts nobody touched. What I remember isn't the idea. It's standing there on the second morning anyway, with no proof my idea would work.

Goldman got a magazine cover three years later, and a bust in the hallway, and a statue with a box of cereal in it. He also watched somebody else build the version of the cart that ended up in the statue.

So here's the question I'd hand you this week. Not whether the thing you built is good. You already know it's good.

What is the smallest part of it that's actually yours to impact? The one call before breakfast. The version you rebuild tonight. The three people you put in the room so the fourth one doesn't have to go alone.

Pick that. Do it Monday, when nothing has changed yet.

And when you walk in and the aisle is still empty, don't ask what's wrong with them.

Ask what they're actually afraid of. Then wade in first. Show them it's safe.

Focus on what you can control.

Resurgam