Sylvan Goldman
| Sylvan Goldman | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Sylvan Nathan Goldman November 15, 1898 Ardmore, Oklahoma |
| Died | November 25, 1984 (aged 86) |
| Occupation | Businessman |
| Known for | Supermarket developer Inventor of the shopping cart |
| Spouse(s) | Margaret Katz |
| Children | Monte Goldman Alfred Goldman |
| Parent(s) | Michael Goldman Hortense Dreyfus |
Sylvan Nathan Goldman (November 15, 1898 – November 25, 1984) was an American businessman and inventor of the shopping cart, which had a pair of large wire baskets connected by tubular metal arms with four wheels.
Born Sylvan Nathan Goldman to a Jewish family, the son of Hortense (née Dreyfus) and Michael Goldman, in Ardmore, Chickasaw Nation, Oklahoma. His mother had emigrated from France and his father from Latvia. He has one older brother Alfred. His father worked at various dry goods stores owned by his wife's family, one of which was located in Indian territory where Sylvan was born. Sylvan was raised in the Jewish faith and was bar mitzvahed. Sylvan learned the retail trade from his father and his mother's uncles.
Goldman served in World War I as a food requisitionist in France. His brother served in the US Army but was discharged for health reasons. Goldman was not educated past the eighth grade.
After the war, in 1919, Sylvan and his brother Alfred opened the Goldman Brothers Wholesale Fruits and Produce in Breckenridge, Texas. They were initially very successful due to the then oil boom in Texas, but their situation quickly deteriorated once the boom ended. The brothers then moved to California where they worked for grocery wholesalers. Initially planning on opening their own wholesale food business in California, they instead returned to Oklahoma at the behest of their uncles who wanted to start their own retail food store chain. The uncles offered to put up all the money as well as to cede the brothers a 75% interest in the venture. Accepting the generous offer and armed with an understanding of a new store concept that they had seen in California, the "supermarket" – where all different types of food were available for sale in a single store and customers served themselves – they returned to Oklahoma and founded the state's first supermarket, the Sun Grocery Company. They opened their first store on April 3, 1920, at 1403 East Fifteenth Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma with Sylvan serving as president and Alfred as vice president. Within one year, they were operating twenty-one Sun Grocery markets throughout the state. Within three years, they had fifty-five stores.
In 1929, they sold the Sun chain to Skaggs-Safeway Stores several months before the . Despite reaping a generous and timely sum from the Safeway sale, Goldman and his brother lost much of their fortune in the crash; and being banned from competing with Safeway in Tulsa due to a non-competition agreement, they moved to Oklahoma City where they purchased five grocery stores and formed a new company called Standard Grocery. They soon implemented the lessons they had learned in Tulsa and with their profits purchased the faltering Humpty-Dumpty grocery store chain in 1934. Alfred died in 1937.
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