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Use A Basket For Easy Shopping
What have supermarkets long known that department stores are now accepting? Shopping carts and baskets can increase consumer purchasing. The big box stores know; they know the convenience of loading the unruly child in the cart will free up the parent to make more purchases, and having the ability to carry more, further, encourages customers to cross shop departments.
A more leisurely pace will keep the shopper in the store longer, which, studies show, will increase their spending.
Sylvan Goldman, owner of Standard Food Markets, in Oklahoma City watched his customers fill their hand baskets, then head for the cash register, so in 1937 he sought a way to make (more) groceries easier to carry. Inspired by a folding chair, he used it for his prototype, adding a basket and wheels. Although not an immediate success with his clientele, he persevered, eventually hiring models to push his "folding basket carrier" through the store to get the cart rolling. He later founded the Folding Carrier Company to market his invention.
His company is still in the cart business, now known as Unarco, manufacturer of industry standard shopping carts. We cannot imagine now a supermarket without this utilitarian steel wire cart bumping down the aisles, an urban landscape without the street person's home on wheels, or a mall parking lot with no car-denting wheeled obstacles.
Before the big mass merchants, in the heyday of Woolworth's, Ben Franklin, and Kresges we used the Fold-Away Shopping Basket (made in the U.S.A. of course, in Madison, Indiana).
The familiar colorful awning-like stripes on canvas will always be associated with the five and tens. The wood handle clutched, we opened them with a snap of the wrist, filled them with our sundries and later deposited them flat again to their wire stand.
Perhaps we used one of the colorful fabric-covered, wire-armature baskets manufactured by the Handy Folding Pail Company of New York.
These lightweight baskets with the fabric handles slung comfortably over the arm. They were manufactured in many types of vinyl and fabric, with particular patterns associated with each chain of stores.
During the 1940's and 1950's, the Kaspar Company of Texas manufactured a tiered steel cart, which held two wire hand baskets. A precursor to the modern cart, heavy items could be stowed below while smaller perishables went on top. The baskets were easily lifted to a counter or cash register, and the frames folded for storage.
This design makes so much sense that there is a newly manufactured cart that can similarly accommodate two of the ubiquitous plastic convenience store hand baskets.
As new designs are making their way into the marketplace, retailers are taking a fresh look at the shopping cart. Perhaps obsolescence has not caught up with Sylvan Goldman's invention. What is in store for the humble cart? Will we continue pushing the real thing, or just the virtual icon?
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