empathy, and the shopping cart's origin story.
Behind the Design- Episode 3
Imagine going to an American supermarket almost a century ago. You pick up a basket and start putting in items you want. It’s not very large, so you soon have to take another. When the second on fills up, you don’t take a third because it’s already heavy and you can’t hold another basket. That’s it for shopping, then. You painstakingly carry your heavy basket to the cashier and pay, even if there was more you wanted to buy.
It was a frustrating experience, especially for women, who were (and still are) the primary household shoppers. Carrying heavy baskets limited what they could buy, and ultimately, how much the stores could sell.
The invention of the shopping cart
It’s 1937, and Goldman owns a chain of supermarkets called Humpty Dumpty (great name, right?) in Oklahoma City.
He watched his customers, mostly women, struggle with their baskets. He saw their fatigue, and the way it constrained their purchasing power. Goldman's insight was pure empathy: "What if I could give them a way to carry more, effortlessly?"
His inspiration was a folding, but with wheels and a basket. He then tasked one of his employees, a mechanic named Fred Young, with actually building this. The very first version was pretty rudimentary: a wooden frame with two wire baskets and finally, wheels. It was clunky, but it worked.
Change is hard for humans.
Here's where another layer of empathy – or the lack thereof – comes into play. When Goldman first introduced his "folding basket carriers" in his stores, customers wouldn’t use them! Men found them unmanly, refusing to push what they saw as a "baby buggy." Women, perhaps conditioned by years of carrying heavy baskets, were also reluctant.
Goldman realized that inventing something wasn't enough; he had to invent the desire for it. So, he used an old but effective marketing strategy. He hired models – both men and women – to walk around his stores, pushing the new carts, pretending to shop and demonstrating how easy they were to use.
This wasn't about advertising— it was about showing people, through direct observation and social proof, how this invention would make their lives easier.
The strategy worked! Within weeks, the carts became incredibly popular. Other retailers quickly took notice, and the shopping cart, though refined and improved over the years (like Orla Watson's nested "telescoping" cart in 1946 which allowed them to stack), rapidly became standard equipment in grocery stores across America and then the world.
Even more empathy.
Women at the time would also be carrying their babies. Now, we could be dry about this and say that a baby can be held in one hand, and the cart could be pushed with the other hand. Except, babies are not objects— they are living, crying, squirming people. This is where the little seat on the shopping cart comes from- it was made so women could put their baby in the cart safely and shop with both hands free.
The shopping cart solved a universal problem that shoppers didn't even realize could be solved until the solution was presented. Nobody asked for it. It lifted off the weight, enabled larger purchases, and fundamentally reshaped the grocery industry, paving the way for the superstores we navigate today.
📖 What I’ve been up to
I tried handsewing! I found a nice shirt that didn’t fit me well. However, it stood no chance on front of the sheer (undeserved) audacity of a design student.
So now I can sew darts on shirts, I guess.
— All the best, Apurva.