A brief history of the shopping bag.

A man by the name of Walter H. Deubner living in Minnesota in the early 1900s owned a grocery shop. He, like all businessmen wanted to improve trade. He noticed that his customers tended to buy only the groceries they could carry. So, he began to think how they could carry more purchases and therefore buy items at any one given time.
It took him four years but at last he came up with the idea of a perforated package. It was strong enough to carry 75 pounds of groceries and was cheap.
The bag was made of paper with card running through it to give it strength. It was called the Deubner shopping bag and sold for 5cents.By 1915 he was selling a million a year. [In 1852 Francis Walle designed a machine for making paper bags.]

In 1921 Sylvan Goldman another businessman and his brother set up a chain of supermarkets these shops had woven baskets for people to carry their shopping around the store.
In 1936 Sylvan began to give some thought to his customers and the movement of their groceries. His first idea was a folding chair with a basket on the seat and wheels on the legs. Then together with a mechanic by the name of Fred Young he came up with the first shopping trolley or cart. This was a metal frame, which held two wire baskets and could be wheeled about. As the inspiration had come from a folding chair it was called the ‘Folding basket carrier’.  Sylvan started a company producing them in 1937.
Initially customers didn’t like these, trolleys, carts, but after some effective marketing and advertising they became very popular.

Today they are in all supermarkets and what would we do without them!