So far this year, the six top discount chains, led by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., have chalked up robust sales increases of 5 percent or more for stores open at least one year. And each of those chains offers customers a shopping cart. His studies show that, in mass-market retail stores, the average shopper with a cart buys 7.2 items, while the customer without a cart buys 6.1 items. Mothers struggling to corral children love carts. The growing ranks of senior citizens lean on carts for support and appreciate not having to carry their purchases.
Carts empower an impulse.
Carts also make many of the newer retailing strategies work. These stores need customers to stay longer, cruise through the whole store and load up. A supermarket essential Invented in the 1930s by an Oklahoma City grocer named Sylvan Goldman, carts were essential before supermarkets could succeed. Goldman's design became a multi-purpose American fixture. Some, it seems, are just too classy to have stainless-steel contraptions junking up their stores.