I Am Guessing Not A Single Reader Will Recognize His Face,

or know his name,

 but I am guessing everyone of us has used his product more than once, his name is Sylvan Goldman, born on November 15, 1898 in the small town of Ardmore, Oklahoma, he was a grocery man, but one thing troubled him in the store, it was the method of serving a customer, in the early 1920s items would be weighed out which was pretty inefficient, also there was a limit to how much a shopper could comfortably carry around a store, Goldman had long-since recognized these shortcomings and in California he saw an answer, the 'self-serve' supermarket, as early as 1916, stores had experimented with a self-serve model, where goods were put out on shelves and customers helped themselves, by 1919, this concept was in full swing in California, and Goldman, an impressionable young lad, was determined to take it back to Oklahoma, soon he was operating 55 stores through Oklahoma, he sold them just before the crash of 1929, in 1934, with his new fortune in hand, he purchased Humpty-Dumpty and Piggly-Wiggly, two ailing food store chains in Oklahoma City, while America toiled in the post-depression years, Goldman remained upbeat: 'the wonderful thing about food is that everyone uses it,' he told a reporter, 'and they only use it once' but the age old problem still came to haunt him, a shopper would shop till the basket was full then stop, in a game changing moment he saw the answer, a shopping trolley,

 and this was how the grand design began,

 and how it was patented,

and marketed, but it was not all plain sailing, at first no one wanted to use the trolleys, he tried various ploys, starting an advertising campaign encouraging people to use trolleys, still no takers, even having an attractive lady at the door of each store handing out trolleys did not work, to increase sales he needed customers to use his trolleys, in another game changing moment he made his staff and then actors cruise the aisle all the time smiling and heaping goods on the trolleys, it worked! before long, herd mentality took hold, shoppers gradually began to accept and cherish the cart, once his stores were thriving with merry cart-pushers, Goldman filmed his success and showed it to other grocers, soon, the carts were in high demand, Goldman sold them for $7 each, and quickly amassed a two year backorder, to fulfil this demand, he licensed his newly-patented design to manufacturing outposts, in later life he sold the company in 1961 and dabbled in real estate, at the time of his death in 1984 he had amassed a fortune of $400 million,

and we still use his design today, for a full read of his fascinating story, and I have left much of it out, have a look here.