Wheeling one's groceries around the store: The invention of the shopping cart, 1936-1953

The shopping cart is undoubtedly a crucial linkage in the food-supply chain of the mass-consumption era.¹ It allows consumer goods to be freed from their weight and to travel easily from the store shelves to the cashier and then to the trunk of the customer's car. However, for a time this seemingly simple device had a hesitant career, failing to meet a stable shape. And yet, this innovation was to confront a central "reverse salient" (to adopt Thomas Hughes's formu-lation)² of the expansion of the supermarket, that is, a localized but acute problem that hampered the growth of the "system" as a whole. This "reverse salient" was primarily in this case a problem of weight: an inadequate adjustment between the capacity of customers' market baskets and the general increase of self-service foodstuff array. As American supermarkets expanded in the 1930s - in terms of retail space, proliferation of merchandise, economies of scale, and expansion of automobile access³ - the carriage of groceries within and out of the store became an issue. How did the shopping cart emerge as a solution? How did this device find its path to the supermarket? The history of this "vehicle" of the mass-consumption economy is one of innovation. As is usual in innovation stories, the "first" shopping cart carries a bundle of great men and great ideas together with paternity disputes and property quarrels. The sociology of innovation has taught us to be cautious with simplistic narratives of innovation, and this includes in particular too heroic plots that overemphasize the role of singular individuals along with too tragic plots that overstress the part played by unmanageable social forces or historical trends. I draw here on a perspective grounded in science and technology studies that innovation is always a collective endeavor that only rarely consists of a linear path from idea to application. The imputation of causes and responsibilities is an issue not only for the historian but also for actors at stake in the innovation process.⁴ The story of the invention of the shopping cart already has a hero. When one searches for information on the shopping cart's origins, the name Sylvan N. Goldman immediately appears. An authorized biography, many citations in the press and in academic sources, and the presence of Goldman's "first shopping cart" in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's department of artifacts attest to his importance. His claim, though, is not undisputable. In 2001 the Smithsonian Institution's archive department acquired the personal files of Orla E. Watson, the inventor of "another" first shopping cart. In this chapter, I reconstruct the early episodes of this innovation in the light of this recently available archival material. This chapter clarifies some factual aspects of the invention of the shopping cart, but its main objective is not to dispute who invented it and when. I am more interested in the object as such: its vacillating shape, its evolving functioning, and its emerging use. Several "scripts"⁵ were embedded into its early design, that is, several ways in which the technical device was to reconfigure the very act of shopping and getting food out of the store. The shopping cart was a crucial ingredient of the self-service revolution that characterized mass consumption in the 1930s in the United States of America and then in the rest of the world. A detailed examination of its early features (for example, the functioning of the wheels, the configuration of the basket, the system of storage) is of use for understanding some aspects of the "how" of this revolution. Early difficulties and design alternatives in the invention of the shopping cart make explicit the different problems and solutions that intermingled together in the nascent supermarket architecture, eventually tracing the path for an irreversible evolution.⁶ To configure the shopping cart meant, at least in part, to reconfigure the market. The chapter thus traces the early history of this market-enabling device, with close attention to the initial ideas of what the shopping cart was meant to do or "make do" - to the store, to shoppers, and to groceries. It is also a contribution to the comprehension of what constituted innovation in the twentieth-century mass-consumption business. The case of the shopping cart confirms that innovation is not a matter of pure technological insight or of pure economic entrepreneurship, but rather a compound ensemble created by heterogeneous actors that try to "interest" each other in the face of material contingency and radical uncertainty.⁷ The chapter opens with Sylvan N. Goldman's story, followed first through Terry P. Wilson's hagiographic account. ⁸ It describes Goldman's entrepreneurial venture and the meanders of his inventiveness in the face of what I call the supermarket "reverse salient": the burden of carrying a market basket. Of particular interest are the way in which the shopping cart emerged first as a "basket carriage" device (literally, a folding chair with wheels), the crucial problem of cart storage, and the emergence of the "telescoping" shopping cart. The second part of the chapter turns attention to Orla E. Watson, the actual inventor of the telescoping solution: a key element for the framing of a stable shape and path for the shopping cart. I analyze Watson's strategies, his commercial and legal battle against Goldman, and the fate of the device and the "trials" it went through.