Design nobody notices: the shopping cart First it freed our hands, then it changed the way we shop

Walking into a supermarket, grabbing a cart, and starting to fill it is one of those gestures we perform without thinking. The shopping cart is right there at the entrance, virtually unchanged for decades: four wheels, a metal basket, a handlebar. It seems like the simplest of service tools, yet its story was born from a very specific problem: at a certain point, customers would stop buying because they could no longer carry everything they had chosen.

How was the shopping cart invented?

To understand why it was needed, we have to go back to the birth of the modern supermarket. In 1916, Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis, introducing on a large scale a system that today seems perfectly normal: self-service. Before that, in most grocery stores, it was the clerk who retrieved and prepared the requested goods. At Piggly Wiggly, customers could instead walk through the store, pick products off the shelves themselves, and bring them to the checkout. This new way of shopping offered far more freedom, but it still had one rather obvious limitation: everything you chose had to fit in the basket you carried on your arm.

It was precisely by observing this problem that, in the 1930s, Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Humpty Dumpty chain in Oklahoma, came up with the idea of the cart. Goldman had noticed that customers tended to stop shopping when their baskets became too heavy. In 1936, he began experimenting with a solution by putting wheels on a structure resembling a folding chair, on which two baskets could be placed. On June 4, 1937, the new system was introduced at his supermarket in Oklahoma City. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History today holds one of the earliest examples and openly describes Goldman's goal: to increase the quantity of products a person could carry while shopping.

The curious thing is that customers initially didn't want it. Women associated it with baby strollers, while some men considered it undignified to push something around inside a supermarket. Goldman essentially had to teach people how to use it: according to the account in Smithsonian Magazine, he hired actors to walk the aisles with the new carts to show other customers how convenient they were. A kind of live product placement, carried out nearly ninety years ago. The design we use today came shortly afterward. Goldman's original cart still required removing the baskets and folding the frame when not in use. In 1946, Orla Watson developed the telescoping cart: the kind that nests inside the next one, creating the rows we still find outside any supermarket today.

The cart as a consumer index

In the meantime, our way of grocery shopping changed completely. The home refrigerator allowed food to be kept longer, meaning people could visit stores less frequently while buying larger quantities. The self-service supermarket placed more and more products directly in front of the consumer. The cart made it possible to carry them all to the checkout without having to bear their weight. The Smithsonian itself explicitly links these elements to the transformation of American postwar shopping habits. At that point, the physical limit of our arms virtually disappeared. And the cart became part of the way we shop.

In 2022, two researchers, Zachary Estes and Mathias Streicher, published a study in the Journal of Marketing dedicated to the relationship between cart design and consumer behavior. They compared the classic horizontal handlebar with a prototype featuring two parallel handles, similar to those of a wheelbarrow. In a field experiment conducted in a European supermarket, they analyzed the purchases of 2,359 customers. Those using the prototype with the new handles tended to buy more products and spend more money.

The explanation proposed by the researchers involves the arm muscles themselves. The different handles activate the biceps and triceps in different ways, and this variation, according to the authors' experiments, can have consequences on purchasing behavior. It is an almost absurd detail, yet it illustrates well how even an apparently insignificant modification can change the relationship between a person and what they are buying.

The new generation of shopping carts

Smart carts add scanners, displays, sensors, and payment systems directly to the basket. Customers can log a product as soon as they place it in the cart, see how much they are spending, find what they are looking for, and in some cases leave the supermarket without going through a traditional checkout.

In 2026, a study published in the Journal of Business Research analyzed 12,418 shopping sessions in a large German supermarket. The use of smart carts was associated with longer time spent in the store, larger baskets, and higher spending, although the researchers themselves note that these are associations observed in the field and not proof that the smart cart alone causes these behaviors. Nearly ninety years after Sylvan Goldman, then, the underlying problem has remained much the same. In 1937, the goal was to prevent an overly heavy basket from making a person stop shopping. Today, the aim is to eliminate other small points of friction: the checkout line, time wasted searching for a product, the difficulty of keeping track of the total bill.

And perhaps that is what makes the shopping cart such a fine example of design that nobody notices. It was never meant to attract attention, and we rarely think of it as a designed object. It simply has to accompany us through the entire supermarket without making us think too much about its presence. In the meantime, however, it has freed our hands, vastly increased what we can carry, and secured a permanent place between us and the shelves. Sylvan Goldman wanted to solve a very concrete problem: his customers still wanted to buy, but they could no longer carry their groceries. He gave them four wheels.