Nobody Would Push His Cart. So He Paid People To: The True Story of Sylvan N. Goldman

Tales of Life: Ordinary People, Extraordinary True Stories · Oct 18, 2026 · 5m

(00:00) The invention nobody used

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The true story of Sylvan Goldman, the Oklahoma City grocer who invented the shopping cart. In 1936 he looked at two folding chairs in his office and imagined a basket on the seat and wheels on the legs. With his mechanic Fred Young he built a folding frame with two wire baskets, and on 4 June 1937 it went into his Humpty Dumpty stores. Nobody used it: men did not want to look too weak to carry a basket, and women said it looked like a baby carriage. So Goldman hired people to push the carts around the store as if they were shopping. Soon stores…