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The history of the shopping trolley

A trip to the supermarket wouldn’t be the same without the shopping trolley, a utilitarian piece of design that allows us to buy more than we can physically carry. Colin Bisset takes a look at the history of an invention that changed consumerism forever.

The shopping trolley is one of the most successful marketing inventions of the 20th century. It came into existence in 1937 as a by-product of a new kind of shopping experience popularised in the 1920s: the supermarket.

The trolley was the idea of American supermarket owner Sylvan Goldman, who dreamed it up as a way of encouraging shoppers to buy more items in his Humpty Dumpty chain of stores.