SHOPPING CART HOLDS CLUES TO CHANGING MARKETS

Shopping carts, those four-wheel carriers used in traversing today's supermarket aisles, have provided clues to the changing character of grocery stores since the Great Depression.

During that era, small one-person grocery operations were the norm, and customers shopped with small baskets to fill their shopping lists. But customers had a tendency to stop shopping when their baskets become too full or too heavy.

Thus, Sylvan Goldman, a grocer of the era, had a better idea. According to the Monthly Labor Review magazine, Goldman designed the first shopping cart in the late 1930s.

Good thing, too. By the early 1940s, larger food stores -- commonly called supermarkets -- were established, featuring many self-service departments, one-stop food shopping, and a number of selected non-food items.

By the 1960s, supermarkets were accounting for a large majority of the nation's food for home consumption, replacing the corner grocery as the number one outlet for family food shopping.

In the early 1980s, there were 162,000 grocery stores in the nation, with 26,850 of them in the supermarket category.

Supermarket size and items carried continued to grow. The average size of a supermarket during a 1983 survey, was 26,600 square feet and stocked about 10,000 items, with $252 billion in sales.

Seventy-two percent of the sales were in supermarkets.