Shopping carts push customers to load up

By Joseph B. Cahill, The Wall Street Journal

As Santa Claus crawls back up the last chimney and heads home, the retail world will begin its annual postmortem: How did discounters once again manage to trounce traditional department stores?

Was it sophisticated pricing, the latest in-store design or cutting-edge inventory management?

Actually, after 20 years of growing discounter dominance, a simpler explanation rolls into view: the shopping cart.

So far this year, the six leading discount chains, led by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., have chalked up robust sales increases of 5 percent or more for stores open at least one year. And each of those chains offers customers the luxury of a shopping cart. Meanwhile, the six leading department-store companies, led by Sears, Roebuck & Co., don't provide carts. Their year-to-date same-store sales increases have all been less than 5 percent.

"It's incredible, the impact of a shopping cart," says Britt Beemer, chairman of America's Research Group Inc., a Charleston, S.C., market research firm. His studies show that in mass-market retail stores, the average shopper with a cart buys 7.2 items, while the customer without a cart buys 6.1 items.

As old-fashioned as they seem, carts are perfectly suited for the way people shop today: They're pressed for time and buy more in fewer trips. Mothers struggling to corral children love them. The growing ranks of senior citizens lean on carts for support and appreciate not having to carry their purchases.

Carts empower an impulse. At any given moment, the typical middle-class family is weighing the purchase of five to eight big-ticket items, such as a VCR or microwave oven, Mr. Beemer says. "Carts will double the sales of bulky items," he says. "If you walk by a VCR and you have your daughter in tow and some other items in your hands, you'll say, 'I'll get it next time.'"

Carts also make many of the newer retailing strategies work. From "category killers" such as Home Depot Inc. to mass-merchandisers such as Dayton Hudson Corp.'s Target Stores to discount clubs such as Costco Wholesale Corp., stores are getting bigger, carrying a wider array of goods and pushing prices lower. These stores need customers to stay longer, cruise through the whole store and load up.

Invented in the 1930s by an Oklahoma City grocer named Sylvan Goldman, carts were essential before supermarkets could succeed. Mr. Goldman's design became a multipurpose fixture up and down American society -- the perfect go-cart for every kid, perfect closet-on-wheels for every street person and, turned upside down and placed over a fire, a mighty fine barbecue grill.

So, why would any sane retailer deny its customers a cart? Some, it seems, are just too classy to have stainless-steel contraptions junking up their stores. "I'm not sure I could see someone buying a $2,000 suit and hanging it over a cart," says Carolyn Biggs, executive vice president and director of stores for the Saks Fifth Avenue unit of Saks Inc.

For department stores that compete directly with discounters, operating in uncarted territory is risky business. At a Sears store on the West Side of Chicago, shoppers carry purchases in white plastic bags emblazoned with the Sears logo. The handle: mere cut-outs near the top of the bag. Filled with heavy purchases, the bag sags and stretches, the plastic around the handle narrowing to a taut, sharp edge. Moving from department to department, shoppers add another bag with each purchase.

Some customers relieve the strain by tossing the bags over their shoulders. Others take their hands out of the handle, twist the top of the bag shut and loop it around their hands for a softer grip.

Arm-weary and hand-sore, Michelle Escobar of Northlake, Ill., has had enough. Her shopping bag is full of heavy winter clothes, and she's dragging it along the floor as she trudges through the electronics department. "It's hard to carry all this and watch him," she says, motioning toward her young son, who's checking out a big-screen television. In fact, Ms. Escobar, 28, has lost interest in shopping today. "I'm ready to go home," she sighs.

Left cartless, many shoppers improvise. "If I didn't have this stroller, I'd be carrying all this stuff," says Yolanda Mack, 27, of River Forest, Ill. She has loaded three large bags of Sears clothing on top of her baby's stroller. Fortunately, her father came along and he is carrying her four-month-old daughter. Ms. Mack thinks Sears ought to provide shopping carts, and says she'd likely shop longer if she had one. But today, the stroller is full, so it's time to leave.

Belatedly, the message is getting through. Sears and Montgomery Ward & Co. are both testing carts -- little ones -- in some stores. Montgomery Ward thinks carts might encourage customers to browse the entire store and buy stuff from more than one department. "We want to promote cross-shopping and we wanted to give the customer a vehicle," says William Bass, vice president of store operations.

These carts bear little resemblance to grocery carts. The baskets are commercial-grade black nylon, with mesh sides and a solid bottom. The tubular black steel frame won't snag apparel or gouge fixtures. Pulling the front of the basket back over the handlebar converts it into a child's stroller with a bag for purchases in back.

Now that Ward's offers a cart, "I'll be apt to come here more often," says Rhonda Buris-Gaines, 45, of Hazelcrest, Ill., at a Ward's near her home. With one child in the seat, she has overalls, several pairs of children's slacks and a sweater draped over the cart and still has a hand free to reel in her other child.

For Sears, this use of new technology is hush-hush. "We are embarked on a pilot program that includes the use of shopping carts in selected stores," a spokeswoman confirms. But she won't say where or when. How about why? A survey suggested, she confides, that "customers might appreciate shopping carts."

The rank-and-file is keeping just as tight-lipped. Brent Paulson, manager of a Sears in Bourbonnais, Ill., says his store began testing carts this past Monday, but he won't elaborate. Christine Dertz, manager of a Chicago Sears, says her store received carts and will deploy them "soon."

Until then, shopping with abandon at Sears won't be easy, as a recent excursion there shows. The $43 of baby clothes, in a plastic bag, rests easily on the left arm. Next a coffee maker and Dustbuster: With elbow bent and forearm extended, that bag doesn't drag on the floor. The path to hardware passes a stack of Sony boomboxes on sale for $66.49 each; one fits under the left arm. A leaf blower, "lightweight" at seven pounds, the box says, is nevertheless bulky, and digs into the right leg. Electrical cord, 100 feet for $19.99, rests on top of the boombox.

Sweat trickles down the neck. Left fingers go a little numb. But onward. A clear-plastic "Holiday Storage Box," about two-and-one-half feet long, is just $9.99. And nearby sits that much-desired 26-piece Craftsman wrench set in the gray case. Hmmm. Kneel. Put the storage box on the leaf blower. The wrenches on top of that. Wedge it all against a shelf, and slowly straighten up. Field of vision is cut off below the chin. Dustbuster and Mr. Coffee bang against the feet with each step. Arms ache. And now the wrenches begin a slow slide. Drop to knees and set it all down. The total would be $319.44, but it can't be done.

Still, there are retailers who don't feel a shopper's pain. Carts just wouldn't work well at J.C. Penney Co., which has check-out registers in each department, says David Nafziger, whose title is manager of modernization. "We don't feel it's appropriate," Mr. Nafziger says.

It's true, department stores weren't laid out for carts. But carts can't reach every nook and cranny of a Target, either, yet they're still handy.

And they're relatively cheap, too. Wal-Mart, with 2,941 U.S. stores, owns about 1.6 million carts. At about $100 each, that's $160 million. Sears spends about 10 times that much annually on advertising to get shoppers into its stores.

Beyond mere convenience, there are psychic returns in cart use. Few sounds are as satisfying as the thump, thump, thump of a shopping cart's wheels rolling across a tile floor, the tone deepening as the cart fills up and becomes heavier. Carts provide personal space between shoppers. And the angry shopper can bang into another's cart, releasing rage with no harm done.

To be sure, the unattended cart poses a danger. "They can put some pretty good scratches and dents in a car," says Joe Miller, police chief in Palos Park, Ill., where cart-and-car incidents are reported at least once every two weeks. Even more serious, people leave children unattended in carts: In 1996, the last year for which the Consumer Product Safety Commission has precise figures, about 16,000 children were hurt in falls from carts. Two-thirds were treated for head injuries. The grocery industry responded by installing little seat belts.

The retailer who offers a cart must, at times, deal with ugly stereotypes. Kohl's Corp., a fast-growing clothing chain based in Menomonee Falls, Wis., used carts and wanted to sell the Dockers brand of casual clothes made by Levi Strauss & Co. Not in those carts you don't, came the reply from Levi Strauss, according to Susan Maher, co-owner of Central Specialties Ltd., Cary, Ill.

How does Ms. Maher know that? Her company makes snazzier little carts -- including the ones Sears and Montgomery Ward are trying out -- and Kohl's ordered a bunch of them to appease Levi Strauss, she says. Kohl's now sells Dockers and has little carts. Neither it nor Levi Strauss would comment on the episode.

No need to apologize for the look of a shopping cart, says Patrick Whitney, director of the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He says carts are a beautiful example of form following function. "They look like what they do, and that's a good thing," he says. If anything, Mr. Whitney would like to see more function; he suggests a drop side, like on a baby's crib, so that merchandise could more easily be unloaded onto checkout conveyors, counters and into cars.

The boom in discount retailing makes for good times in the cart business. Rehrig International Inc., Richmond, Va., makes plastic carts and says sales have doubled in the past four years to more than 500,000 carts a year. Unarco Industries Inc., a unit of Chicago conglomerate Marmon Group, controlled by the Pritzker family, sells about 600,000 carts a year.

Unarco is the successor to Folding Carrier Co., the cart company founded by the shopping-cart inventor, Mr. Goldman. He dreamed up his invention after noticing that his grocery customers headed to the cashier as soon as their handbasket was full. One night in the office, his eyes fell upon a folding chair. Add wheels and a basket, he thought. It wasn't quite that easy: The first prototype folded up rolling over a matchstick and lost its wheels when it hit a bump.

But Mr. Goldman kept on, and in 1937 advertised the carts in newspapers: "Basket juggling is a lost art at your Standard Food Stores." One of his early models is enshrined at the Smithsonian Institution. And a 1978 biography, by Terry Wilson, seemed to know something about the future of retailing. Its title: "The Cart That Changed the World."