© Mark Ollig
The Life magazine cover from Jan. 3, 1955, featured a painting by artist Norman Rockwell of a smiling toddler sitting in a grocery shopping cart.
In 1937, Sylvan “Syl” N. Goldman owned the Humpty Dumpty grocery store chain in Oklahoma City.
After observing customers having difficulty holding wire shopping baskets on their arms while attending to their energetic children, he decided there needed to be a less frustrating way to shop in his store.
Goldman got the idea for making a wheeled shopping cart from a wooden folding chair in his office to push down the grocery store aisles.
“Why not place a basket on the seat and wheels on the legs?” Goldman is said to have asked himself while staring at the chair.
After a few initial attempts, Goldman’s shopping cart was successfully manufactured and patented through his company, the Folding Basket Carrier Company.
Goldman filed for a patent on his shopping cart March 14, 1938, describing it as “a novel rollable market basket carriage of a lightweight portable type expressly but not necessarily, adapted for convenient usage by shopping customers in grocery stores and similar establishments.”
April 9, 1940, the US Patent Office granted him patent 2,196,914 for his shopping cart titled Folding Basket Carriage For Self-Service Stores.
Goldman’s cart resembles a metal folding chair (on wheels) with an upper and lower wire basket. A metal-framed rubber handgrip bar allows the shopping cart to be pushed and maneuvered.
The rest, as they say, is shopping cart history.
It’s 81 years later – be on the lookout for intelligent shopping carts rolling down a grocery store aisle near you.
I recently learned about a new shopping cart available from an AI (artificial intelligence) company called Caper, which might have amazed Goldman.
Called the Caper Smart Cart, it is an AI-powered shopping cart used inside a grocery store.
Caper has been working on the next generation of intelligent food store shopping carts.
Of course, brick-and-mortar stores have sought and employed various ways of reducing people’s face-to-face interactions amid the ongoing COVID-19 virus.
“In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for autonomous checkout technology is driving grocers and retailers to innovate and adopt new technologies that keep shoppers safe and streamline checkout,” said Lindon Gao, CEO and co-founder of Caper.
The next-generation Caper shopping cart can exchange information with a store’s inventory and database systems.
Caper’s sensor fusion and deep learning computer-aided automation activate whenever placing an item inside the cart’s shopping basket.
The intelligent shopping carts’ display screen shows each product and total quantities in your cart.
Contained within a white plastic-frame molding facing the customer is the Caper Smart Cart display monitor (similar in size to a laptop screen).
When shopping in the produce department, the smart cart display will inform the shopper of nearby produce items for sale and coupon specials.
The smart shopping cart includes an onboard scale for weighing bulk items to be purchased.
If a shopper selects spaghetti and meatballs, recipe recommendations will appear on the smart carts’ display screen.
The cart’s screen can show a store map of your location and the aisle and shelf for a specific product.
A running cost total of the items inside the smart shopping cart is also displayed.
If an item is removed from the smart cart and put back on the shelf, the checkout total automatically adjusts.
As we push the smart cart down the aisle, the display screen shows the grocery store’s specials, price discounts, recipes, and nutritional information for various food products we pass by.
The smart cart’s built-in pay-and-go automated program means not having to take items to a cashier checkout lane or sliding purchases through the self-checkout scanner.
You only need to remove your items from the shopping cart, bag them, and leave the store.
Your receipt is automatically sent from the Caper Smart Cart to the app on your smartphone.
And to think I was happy finding a shopping cart without its wheels going “squeak-squeak-squeak” throughout the store.
To see a short video presentation about the Caper smart shopping cart of the future, visit https://bit.ly/3jiB0m5.
Caper is in Anguilla, a British overseas territory located in the Eastern Caribbean. Its website is www.caper.ai.
You can see Sylvan N. Goldman’s US Patent for his shopping cart at https://bit.ly/3oNxIbC.
Someday, an autonomous robot may be pushing a smart shopping cart down food store aisles and delivering groceries to our home in a self-driving automobile.
Stay tuned.
Also, remember to stay safe out there.
