An action movie will be played as a Guys Night Out.

The title of the movie will be announced a few days in advance.

 

For more information, contact Bob Turnage.

 

 

Sylvan Goldman's father, Michael Goldman, was a Jewish immigrant from Latvia who had made the famous land run into Oklahoma Territory. His mother, Hortense Dreyfus, had emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine in France. 

 

Sylvan grew up working in his family's dry goods stores, learning retail from the ground up. He never made it past eighth grade.

 

But he understood one thing perfectly: how to sell.

 

 

 

After serving as a food requisitionist in France during World War I, Goldman and his older brother Alfred opened a wholesale produce business in Texas. When oil prices collapsed in 1921 and wiped them out, they moved to California to study a revolutionary new concept they had heard about —- the supermarket.

 

 

 

The idea was radical. Instead of customers requesting items from a clerk behind a counter, they would walk through the store themselves, selecting their own groceries. Everything under one roof. Self-service.

 

 

 

The brothers brought the concept back to Oklahoma. By 1920 they had opened their first store in Tulsa. Within a year, they had twenty-one locations. They sold the chain to Safeway in 1929, just months before the stock market crash—timing that seemed like genius. Then the Depression wiped out their Safeway stock.

 

 

 

But Goldman believed in a simple truth: "The wonderful thing about food is that everyone uses it, and they only use it once."

 

 

 

He dove back in. By the mid-1930s, he owned the Humpty Dumpty and Standard Food Markets chains in Oklahoma City. BUT..  he noticed a problem.

 

 

 

Customers carried woven baskets as they shopped. When the baskets got heavy, they stopped shopping. It didn't matter if their lists were longer. It didn't matter if they needed more. The moment their arms grew tired, they headed for the checkout counter.

 

 

 

Goldman tried assigning employees to approach customers with full baskets, offering to hold them at the front while the shopper grabbed a fresh one. It helped, but not enough. The limitation wasn't the basket. It was the human arm.

 

What to do?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One night in 1936, Goldman sat alone in his office, staring at a wooden folding chair trying to figure out a solution. 

 

An idea took shape. 

 

 

 

What if he put wheels on the legs? What if he mounted a basket where the seat was, and another basket below? What if customers could push their groceries instead of carrying them?

 

 

 

He grabbed his mechanic, Fred Young, and the two men spent the night tinkering. Their prototype was crude: a metal frame inspired by the folding chair, with wheels at the bottom and two wire baskets stacked on top.

 

 

 

Goldman placed an advertisement in the newspaper: "Can you imagine wending your way through a spacious food market without having to carry a cumbersome shopping basket on your arm?"

 

He was certain shoppers would embrace the freedom.

 

JUNE 4, 1937: 

 

FOR THE FIRST TIME, HE PUT THE FIRST SHOPPING CARTS IN HIS STORES. HE EXPECTED INSTANT SUCCESS. SHOPPERS WOULD LOVE THEM.

 

 

 

They did not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Men refused to use the carts. Pushing a basket on wheels felt weak, effeminate. They could carry their own groceries, thank you very much.

 

Women refused to use the carts. The contraptions looked too much like baby carriages, and they had spent enough years pushing those. "I've pushed my last baby buggy," they told store employees.

 

Older shoppers refused to use the carts. They worried the wheels made them look feeble, unable to manage on their own.

 

Goldman watched his invention sit idle day after day. Everything he had built toward seemed to be collapsing.

 

 

 

But Sylvan Goldman was not a man who accepted failure.

 

 

 

SO -- WHAT TO DO??

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So...

 

 

 

He then placed another advertisement in the newspaper claiming that his "No Basket Carrying Plan" had met with instant approval. It was a lie. The carts were still being ignored. But Goldman understood that perception could become reality.

 

 

 

 

Then he tried something even bolder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He hired actors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not just any actors. 

 

Goldman selected people carefully: 

+ a young woman in her late twenties, 

+ another woman in her forties, 

+ someone in their late fifties

+ a man around thirty, 

+ another man around fifty. 

 

 

 

AND...

 

 

 

 

 

 

He stationed them throughout his store with shopping carts, filled the baskets with merchandise, and then pushed them through the aisles as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

 

 

 

He positioned greeters at the entrance. When real customers walked in and hesitated at the carts, the greeters gestured toward the actors. "Look, everybody is using them. Why not you?"

 

It worked.

 

Within weeks, the shopping cart had transformed from a curiosity into a necessity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Word spread to other grocers. They wanted carts too. 

 

Goldman established the Folding Basket Carrier Company to manufacture them. 

 

Demand exploded so quickly that by 1940, store owners looking to purchase shopping carts faced a seven-year waiting list.

 

 

 

That same year, three years after shoppers had refused to touch them, shopping carts appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. The object that had seemed so strange, so emasculating, so reminiscent of baby carriages, had become an icon of American consumer life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But Goldman never stopped innovating. 

He invented the grocery sacker. 

The folding inter-office basket carrier. 

The handy milk bottle rack. 

The airport baggage cart. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Each invention built upon the same insight: 

 

 

 

He watched the American landscape reshape itself around the simple principle he had discovered in 1936: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By the time Goldman retired as head of Goldman Enterprises in 1982, his fortune was estimated by Forbes magazine at over two hundred million dollars. Oklahoma experts put the figure closer to half a billion. The eighth-grade dropout, the son of immigrants, the man whose invention had been mocked and ignored, had become one of the wealthiest people in the state.

 

 

 

Today, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five million shopping carts roll through American stores at any given moment—roughly one cart for every thirteen people in the country. Every supermarket, every big-box store, every warehouse club owes its existence in part to a simple insight: when you remove the burden from customers' arms, they buy more.

 

The original cart that Goldman introduced in 1937—the one that sat ignored while customers walked past—now rests in the Science Museum Oklahoma.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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