The Shopping Trolley Began as Two Folding Chairs

The trolley you push round a supermarket has a settled, obvious look about it, as though it had always been there waiting for you. It has not. The first one was built in 1936 out of two wooden folding chairs, and it was, by any standard, an odd thing to meet in a grocery shop.

The grocer who built it ran a chain of grocery stores in Oklahoma City, and he had noticed something that nagged at him. Shoppers carried a wire hand basket. When the basket grew heavy, they stopped shopping and went to the till, whether or not they had finished the list. The limit on a week's groceries was not money, or appetite, or what the shelves held. It was the weight a person could carry on one arm.

His answer was to take two folding chairs, stand them seat to seat, fit wheels under the legs and drop a wire basket onto the seat. Later versions carried two baskets, one above the other, on a light frame that folded flat when the shop shut for the night. He set up a company to make them, named with no poetry at all the Folding Basket Carrier Company. The first official trolley went onto the shop floor on 4 June 1937.

Nobody would touch it. Women who had spent years pushing prams had no interest in pushing anything else around a shop. Men found the contraption faintly humiliating and said outright that wheeling a basket about was women's work. So the trolleys stood at the front of the store, clean and empty, while customers walked past them and picked up the old wire baskets, exactly as they always had.

The fix was pure theatre. The grocer hired men and women to walk the aisles pushing loaded trolleys, chatting, entirely at ease, as though this were simply how shopping was done now. A greeter at the door offered a trolley to everyone who came in, so that refusing one took more effort than accepting it. Within weeks the real customers were copying the hired ones, and the embarrassment quietly disappeared.

After that it went off like a rocket. By 1940 a shop wanting new trolleys reportedly faced a seven-year waiting list. That same year brought the shape we actually use today: the nesting trolley, with a back flap that swings up so one slides into the next. It came out of a patent fight over the design, and it answered a question nobody had got round to asking, which was where to put four hundred trolleys overnight.

It is tempting to file all this under a good gadget that caught on slowly, but the reason it mattered is bigger than the object. Raising the ceiling on how much one person can carry changed the size of a weekly shop, and the size of the weekly shop went on to change the size of the shop itself, the width of the aisles, the height of the shelves, the amount of stock a store has to hold, and eventually the boot of the family car that the whole load is tipped into. The modern supermarket is laid out around the turning circle of a trolley.

The small details survive because the shopping trolley is unusually well documented for a piece of shop furniture. A historian at the University of Oklahoma wrote a full biography of the grocer in 1978, working from company records, and it is still the standard account; the state's own historical encyclopedia carries the story; and the very first trolley ever put in front of customers is kept in a museum in Oklahoma City. That is a strange retirement for an object whose entire purpose was to be pushed about and never once looked at.