Everyone Has a Theory About Shopping Carts
An essential tool. An inspiration for artists. A public nuisance. The humble shopping cart has been all of these in the decades since it was invented. But what does it reveal about our character?
The next time you go to the grocery store, consider the ordinary shopping cart as something more than a rattling basket blocking your parking space.
In the 1930s, an American grocer named Sylvan Goldman invented the precursor to the modern day shopping cart, using a folding frame that was fixed on a set of wheels. He hoped that people would buy more groceries if they did not have to carry heavy baskets as they browsed.
Shopping carts have been the focus of books and films, and their use examined in magazine columns and classrooms as tools to explain how humans behave in public. They have found a dubious niche on the internet as the stars of a YouTube show, followed by half a million people. They have even inspired musicians: The steady clacking of a cart rolling down a street was the inspiration for both the sound and the words in Neil Young’s 1994 song “Safeway Cart.”
They are also a nuisance. Legislators and store owners across the United States have struggled with how to prevent the carts from being stolen, left in handicapped parking spots, discarded on sidewalks, abandoned at bus stops or tipped into creeks.
