From "The Long Tail", by Chris Anderson:
"The first supermarket was a King Kullen store that opened in Queens, New York, on August 4, 1930, in the depths of the Great Depression."
And:
"Key to the early success of the supermarket was the shopping cart (first introduced in 1937), the automobile, free parking lots, and mechanical refrigerators in the home and store."
Do you see what he just said? There were seven years between the invention of the supermarket and the invention of the shopping cart.
To make food shopping an excellent experience you need the store and the cart. Many other things too, but the gestalt includes a well-stocked, staffed and maintained store and carts. Otherwise they're punishing their best customers, the ones who buy the most. Anyone can pick up a brisket and carry it home, in fact my New Yorker mother-in-law once famously called a car service to deliver one before a family gathering when she didn't have time to go to the store, there were too many preparations going on.
(To this day I still have a mental image right out of a Woody Allen movie of a big piece of meat wrapped in paper, happily sitting on the back seat of a 1987 Ford Crown Victoria as it gets whisked along Queens Boulevard in high style...)
I love history and I love to learn from history and my goal for our dental practice is to never have a patient experience where something important is missing. Something as important as the shopping cart...
(Please tell me directly if such a thing ever happens at [email protected])
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