On This Day, April 9, 1940, the patent for the first shopping cart is granted to its inventor Sylvan Goldman, the owner of a Humpty Dumpty Grocery store in Oklahoma City. It was essentially a folding chair with wheels and baskets attached. The carts were initially a flop, as shoppers were reluctant to use them--men found them effeminate and women thought them too much like a baby carriage - so he hired models to shop with them.

Eventually, folding carts became very popular and Goldman became a multimillionaire by collecting a royalty on every folding design shopping cart in the United States.

By any measure, Goldman was an innovator. In addition to his invention of the shopping cart, early in his career as a grocer he developed many of the advertising and marketing techniques now commonly used by supermarkets.

He once said his idea for the shopping cart came from watching women carrying baskets. ''They had a tendency to stop shopping when the baskets became too full or too heavy,'...

This story came to mind today, because it was on this Day, February 26, 1829, that Levi Strauss was born in Buttenheim, Bavaria. Levi was the son of Hirsch Strauss and his second wife, Rebecca.

At age 18, Levi Strauss travelled with his mother and two sisters to the United States to join his brothers Jonas and Louis, who had begun a wholesale dry goods business in New York City called J. Strauss Brother & Co. Their business was thriving.

When the Gold Rush hit, they wanted to meet the needs of the miners and farmers also seeking their fortune, and devised a plan for Levi to travel to the West Coast and set up a version of their dry goods business there.

Strauss boarded a steamer bound for Panama, then walked across the isthmus and boarded another steamer sailing north to the shores of the California Gold Rush. He arrived on a rainy March day in 1853, and soon set up a dry goods wholesale business on San Francisco’s waterfront under his own name —Levi Strauss & Co.

Within two ...