The Metal Shopping Cart’s High Tech Makeover

Groundbreaking, innovative, trailblazing — these aren’t the type of adjectives you would think of to describe the typical shopping cart that gets pushed around physical stores. In fact, most of them look pretty similar from store to store. But, then again, you probably haven’t seen what a few enterprising retailers are up to when it comes to giving these awkward, shin-bruising staples of the brick-and-mortar retail world a new, high tech lease on life.

Long gone are the days when the only innovation coming to shopping carts was the automatic wheel lock that prevented people from taking the carts out of the parking lot. Now, at a time when everything is going digital and mobile, Walmart is gearing up to overhaul the metal basket-on-wheels we call the shopping cart. Their idea goes well beyond the novel idea that Target dreamed up — that is, to make them smaller for America’s future shoppers. Target’s move didn’t go over well for the retailer: After fights broke out over the limited number of  kids’ versions of the shopping cart, Target was forced to scrap the idea altogether.

Best. Laid. Plans.

The cart before the shopper?

Enter Walmart, and the self-driving shopping cart. That’s right, if it’s up to Walmart, you won’t even have to push your own wares around their wide aisles—  what could be better? Plus, according to the budget-conscious retailer, these driverless carts will not only make shoppers lives easier, they’ll help Walmart  save money, too.

It’s all about the experience.

It’s also not surprising retailers are looking to breathe new life into anything that touches the in-store experience: Consumers may not be trekking into physical stores as often as they once did — but they still like going to them, and often spend more money there when they go. And, as we all know, today’s shopper is all about the experience, so it’d better be a good one.

So, why not let Walmart upgrade your big box experience? In the patent filing Walmart made for their self-driving carts, it can be seen that these carts will have detachable motors and will be equipped with sensors and video cameras. Customers will request the cart and the detachable motors will go get the cart and bring it to them. The device that alerts the motor to go find a shopping cart may even be a customer’s smartphone.

The idea, it seems, is to make it easy for those who enter the store thinking that they only wanted to buy one thing, but actually saw 14 things they wanted to buy could call a cart, on demand. There’s also the convenience/laziness factor, but since this is America, we don’t need to remind you that winding your way through a sprawling Walmart on the hunt for that special Snuggie (or a shopping cart, for that matter) is no small feat. The other “use case” is, perhaps, a cost-saving measure since employees who are tasked with rounding up shopping carts won’t have to do that work anymore, freeing them up to work elsewhere in the store.

Shopping cart robots?

According to the patent filing, the detachable motors could also go around the store and parking lot collecting all the abandoned shopping carts and bringing them back to a docking station.  These high-tech shopping carts could also help manage Walmart’s inventory, since part of the filing talks about a situation in which the the shopping cart system receives a request for a product, looks through an inventory database and if it is in stock sends the shopping cart to make sure it’s really there. Thus, more automation means more unattended retail and, most likely, more savings for the consumer and higher profits for Walmart (fewer jobs, too, of course).

What’s in a cart?

Shopping carts may not get much thought but if it wasn’t for Sylvan Goldman, the inventor of the first shopping car in June of 1937, who knew how we would shop. The owner of the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oakland, California, Goldman pondered how customers would be able to move the groceries they were purchasing, dreaming up the shopping cart as the answer. Goldman used a wooden folding chair, placed a basket on the seat and wheels on the legs and — voilà! — the first shopping cart was designed.

From there, one of his employees, mechanic Fred Young, had a go at it — creating the first shopping cart with a metal frame and two wire baskets. Arthur Kosted, another mechanic, came up with a way to mass produce the carts, and while they didn’t take off at first, they were hugely successful after Goldman hired male and female models to push the carts around his stores.  Then, in 1946, the shopping cart got an overhaul when inventor Orla Watson came up with a design that didn’t require assembly or disassembly like Goldman’s cart did.

Today there are around 25 million shopping carts in the U.S alone. A staple of most retailers, and expected by all consumers, they’re made by numerous U.S. manufacturers.

A shopping cart by any other name…

So, will Walmart’s cart of the future take off? Let’s look at the cart’s record.

Microsoft, for instance, did try to bring technology to the shopping carts back in 2008. The idea was that customers would be able to log onto a website, type up their grocery lists and when they get to the store and swipe their card on a console with a screen attached to the cart, the list would appear.  As shoppers scanned items and placed them in their cart, the same console would keep a running tally of the amount and cross items off the list.  Microsoft’s innovation failed to take off, however.

That said, two-tier shopping carts, kiddie shopping carts, specialty and lawn and garden shopping carts, stocking carts and carts shaped like rocket ships or racing cars are relatively widely available. They come in plastic, metal and different colors.  Technibilt out of  Newton, North Carolina even makes a shopping cart for special needs children — and, while the innovations aren’t  of a digital nature yet, they arguably keep shoppers in the stores, encouraging bulk buying, which are the main ingredients  for a successful retailer.

Save Money. Go Driverless. Live Better?