We only care about shopping and never seem to notice the history of shopping carts. Little did they know that the invention of the most easily forgotten thing had a real twist.
But few inventions have looked so deeply into consumers' spending habits.
This business wizard was Sylvan Goldman, the inventor of the shopping cart.
The emergence of the shopping cart followed the popularity of the American home refrigerator. Because people no longer worry about the shelf life of food, they can buy more things at one time. At that time, the supermarket only provided metal woven baskets, and customers would not buy more goods after full purchase, which virtually reduced the sales of the supermarket. Goldman found this pain point of customers.
A folding chair, a shopping basket, and four wheels -- the supermarket trolley -- were born.
However, the launch of shopping cart did not meet people's expected needs. After thinking about it, Goldman believes that people's cognition of new things is random and subjective, and only by creating demand can people's cognition be changed.
Nowadays, shopping cart has become an indispensable product when we go shopping in the supermarket.
A crash course in business in a small town
Sylvan Goldman was born on November 5, 1898 in a small town in Ardmore, Where he worked in a dried fruit store.
For him, the store was a crash course in business, learning as a teenager how to maximize customer satisfaction before refrigeration became widespread.
Back then, American grocery stores had a clerk in a white apron next to everything, and if you needed two jin of sorghum, the clerk weighed you and packed you up. Customers are carrying loads of stuff to the checkout line. This model is not ideal, it requires a large number of staff, very inefficient.
Goldman saw the flaw long ago, and found the answer at a self-service supermarket in California.
As early as 1916, grocery stores tried the self-service model, where items were placed on shelves and customers picked them up. The concept was fully developed in California in 1919. Goldman decided to bring the model back to his native Oklahoma.
In April 1920 Goldman opened the Sun Grocery Company, the first supermarket in Goldman's state. Within three years, he had opened 55 such stores.
Goldman was optimistic during the 1929 financial crisis, but his optimism was not enough to keep up with the economic situation. His store began to fail and he first felt the fear of going out of business.
By the late 1930s, significant changes had taken place: freon was developed in 1930, and freezers began to spread widely. By the end of the 1930s, more than half of American households had refrigerators.
As a result, consumers will be able to buy more than what they eat that day.
Here's the problem: In those days, self-service supermarkets offered only one basket made of metal silk.
Carrying something too heavy reduces the desire to buy
Goldman recalled in 1970, "If we could have housewives shopping with two baskets and one hand free to pick, we would have done much more business."
Then he began to realize that the problem facing the businessman was the pain point of the customer, and that in order to sell more goods, he had to find a way to make the customer buy more cheaply.
The solution was this: when a clerk saw that a customer's basket was full, he would deliver it to the cashier and give them an empty basket. That, it turns out, is a little too complicated.
While Goldman was struggling, one night he saw a folding chair in his office and felt a bright future beckoning. Goldman jumped for joy.
He grabbed a couple of folding chairs, jumped on the desk, and put the basket on the chair. Goldman was so excited that he didn't sleep. Early the next morning, he went to a repair shop and found a repairman.
In this way, the shopping cart changed our lives.
Shoppers are not interested in shopping carts
Goldman has also made several upgrades to the shopping cart. Baskets can be taken down when not in use, and folding carts can be stacked inside each other to save space.
Goldman is thrilled that customers have tripled their ability to buy, and the shopping experience is so much easier that housewives no longer have to carry 15-20 pound baskets around.
But compared with Goldman's excitement, customers weren't thrilled with the novelty.
On June 4, 1936, Goldman set up these humble shopping carts in front of Piggly Wiggly supermarket, expecting customers to be pleasantly surprised by what they saw. But the beauty of the carts was despised by the customers, and Goldman wondered why no one was using them.
"I walked into one of our biggest stores and none of them used the shopping cart I had invented. Housewives complained that it looked too much like a baby stroller and they did not want to repeat the 'baby-taking routine' in the supermarket. Male customer more a face despise, you think Lao Tze so thick two arms is white long? No one wants to touch the shopping cart."
Goldman's shopping cart was a complete failure.
Throughout the 1930s, many other companies followed Goldman's idea and launched shopping carts, all of which ended in failure.
Learn to "create demand"
Goldman, 39, believes shopping carts will change people's lives, so he turned his attention to influencing public opinion.
The first thing Goldman did was put an AD in a local newspaper. Despite the hype, customers didn't buy it.
He remembered the old trick of having a pretty girl stand in front of the supermarket and give each customer a shopping cart when they came in, but it still didn't work.
Goldman started thinking: Users' perceptions of new things are often random and subjective, so why not reshape them?
Not necessarily to cater, but to learn to "create needs."
So Goldman hired professional actors and actresses to let these fake shopping cart users frequently "walk" in the shopping mall, making it no longer embarrassing to push shopping cart, but gradually making it popular, and finally forming a scale of shopping cart.
Soon, demand for shopping carts exploded and Goldman sold them to other supermarkets for $7 each. To meet the demand, he produced shopping carts for two years and patented his own design.
Larger shopping carts also stimulate spending
With the continuous improvement of refrigeration equipment and the help of preservatives, customers' consumption desire was greatly stimulated. With the booming of supermarkets, Goldman quickly accumulated a large fortune.
Seventy-five years later, Sylvan Goldman invented shopping carts that are basically the same as today's shopping carts.
By the time he died in 1984, Goldman had amassed a fortune of $400 million.
His shopping cart company later changed its name to Unarco, and the company still exists today. Once a $7 shopping cart, it now adds security locks to prevent theft, each worth $150.
Ten years after His death, Goldman's invention was emblazoned with another world-changing company: The Internet e-commerce site Amazon.
The shopping cart that was not seen in those days has become an indispensable part of our life.
This great invention, which we have neglected for 80 years, is the result of Goldman's profound insight into human nature. A small shopping cart has implications for design, marketing and even psychology.
Since then, specialized research on shopping carts has shown that larger carts stimulate as much as 40% of purchases, and supermarket giants like Whole Foods, Safeway and Wal-Mart stores Inc. have expanded the size of their carts.