The shopping cart was invented by American grocery-store owner Sylvan Nathan Goldman in the late 1930s, with his first carts debuting in 1937 and a key patent granted in 1939.

Quick Scoop: Who invented the shopping cart?

  • Inventor: Sylvan Nathan Goldman, an Oklahoma grocery magnate who owned the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain.
  • When: First shopping carts appeared in his Oklahoma City stores on June 4, 1937.
  • Key patent: U.S. Patent 2,155,896 for a “combination basket and carriage” issued in April 1939.
  • Basic idea: A wheeled, folding metal frame modeled partly on a wooden folding chair, designed to hold removable wire baskets so customers could carry more groceries with less effort.

How the idea came about

Goldman watched his customers juggle hand‑held baskets and stop shopping once baskets became too heavy or full. He realized that if people could push their goods instead of carrying them, they would likely buy more and feel less fatigued while shopping.

One evening, he and mechanic Frank Young experimented by putting a grocery basket on a folding wooden chair with wheels, creating a rough prototype of the first cart. From that simple setup, they refined the design into a metal frame with two baskets, one above the other, which could fold for easier storage.

Early reaction: people actually hated it

When the carts first showed up in 1937, many shoppers resisted using them. Men felt pushing a cart looked unmanly, while some women thought it resembled pushing a baby carriage and didn’t want that association in the store.

To change minds, Goldman hired models—attractive young women and older men—to stroll the aisles using the new carts, making them look normal and even aspirational. Shoppers gradually followed their lead, and the “basket carriage for self‑service stores” soon became a standard part of the supermarket experience.

After Goldman: the telescoping cart twist

Goldman’s original carts used separate baskets that were stacked and a folding frame that collapsed like a chair, which made storage and setup a bit fiddly. In 1946, inventor Orla E. Watson created a “telescoping” shopping cart that could nest directly into the next cart, using a hinged rear panel so carts slid into one another for compact storage.

There was a patent dispute when Goldman sought similar rights, but in 1949 he relinquished his claim and obtained licensing rights instead, while Watson kept royalties on each telescoping cart produced. Thanks to this refinement, the nested metal carts you see lined up at store entrances today are direct descendants of Watson’s telescoping design built on Goldman’s original shopping‑cart concept.

Bottom note: Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.