A Shopping Cart Story

We’ll be heading out to the grocery store to do some shopping this weekend. When we get there, we’ll use a device so familiar to Americans that we typically don’t really give it much thought: a grocery cart. We’ll disengage the closest one from the long line, wheel it in, and start heading up and down the aisles.

The humble grocery cart is such an integral part of the whole supermarket experience it’s hard to imagine one without the other. It’s one of those devices that seems so obvious now, viewed in retrospect, that you’d think it wouldn’t even need to be invented.

But it was, of course. The grocery cart was the brainchild of Sylvan N. Goldman, seen above, who was a grocer in Oklahoma. In the 1930s, Goldman bought the Humpty Dumpty grocery store chain and introduced a number of new ideas–including, most notably, the grocery cart. Goldman came up with the idea in 1937, in his carpentry shop, and his groundbreaking invention received a patent in 1939. His first device was a grocery basket that attached to a frame with wheels. The baskets could be removed and stacked and the frame could be collapsed and easily stored. Goldman formed the Folding Basket Carrier Company to manufacture it.

Goldman’s ingenious idea swept the nation and revolutionized the grocery business. Shoppers who formerly were limited to what they could fit into a handheld basket now could buy even more. Throw in the concept of people driving to grocery stores, and you’ve got the two basic elements of the modern American big grocery store run. Goldman’s daintier device quickly morphed into the big, heavy, honker grocery cart that we all know so well. I do, in particular, because my first job, at the Big Bear supermarket, involved going into the parking lot at the end of the day and retrieving every orphan cart that had been left behind by shoppers and returning them to the store.

So when we will be loading up our cart this weekend, we’ll have Sylvan Goldman to thank. Now, if we only knew the back story of the unlucky shopper who got the first “folding basket carrier” with a rogue wheel . . . .

Piecing Together The Back Story Of Humpty Dumpty

The familiar nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty is:  “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.”  Is Humpty Dumpty, like many nursery rhymes and fairy tales, based on an actual person or event?

This piece explores the back story of the rhyme and potential explanations for its origin.  It concludes that the two proffered explanations of the rhyme that try to link Humpty Dumpty to historical events — like the death of Richard III — are implausible and decides that Humpty Dumpty was originally intended as a riddle to which the answer was an egg — which is why Humpty Dumpty is always shown as an egg in nursery rhyme books.  I’m not so sure about that, because the piece also notes that the phrase “humpty dumpty” first came into the English language as a reference to an alcoholic concoction and then later was used to describe a clumsy or a stumbling inebriated person.  Given the latter meaning, I think it’s more likely than not that the rhyme traces its origin to a drunk person who fell from a wall and was killed.

It’s not a pretty picture, but when you think about it most of the old nursery rhymes and fairy tales were pretty disturbing.  Ring around the Rosie is commonly thought to trace its origins to the Black Death, with “rosie” referring to the red swellings of the lymph nodes associated with the Bubonic Plague, posies being carried to avoid the smell of the afflicted, and “all fall down” reflecting the suddenness of death.  Rock a Bye Baby and its baby mysteriously perched on the treetop who falls to the ground isn’t very reassuring to children, either — and we haven’t even gotten to ugly tales of cannibalism, poisoning and terrifyingly smart wolves like Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood.

We heard these stories as children and somehow managed to make it to adulthood without too much long-term psychic damage.  Kids are more resilient than we think.