Free Cheap by Ellen Ruppel Shell

eliminating butchers, bakers, and experienced clerks. Stock workers simply piled the shelves and refrigerator cases with factory-packaged goods, and customers helped themselves. Shopping carts, also adapted from supermarkets, were a discount store staple and a surprisingly effective one. Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oklahoma City, introduced the carts in 1937 to ward off the problem of shoppers retreating to the checkout line when their arms were too tired from carrying handheld baskets. His original design involved a metal folding chair rigged out with wheels, but the device tended to collapse whenever it snagged as much as a misplaced hairpin. Goldman successfully stiffened the design and touted his invention as the “no basket carrying plan.” Customers were not impressed; men found the carts effeminate, and women found them insulting. As one female customer complained, “I’ve pushed my last baby buggy.” A keen student of the “monkey see, monkey do” school of human nature, Goldman hired burly men and attractive women to pose as customers and dutifully roll shopping carts up and down the aisles of his stores. The ruse worked: Customer reluctance faded, and later that year Goldman founded the Folding Basket Carrier Corporation. Soon shopping carts were commonplace, although not in department stores where they were considered undignified, and impractical because they tended to get stalled on escalators and took up too much space in elevators. But discount stores, with their stripped-down ambience, sprawling single-floor layout, and acres of parking, were perfectly suited to shopping carts and adopted them with relish. The impact of the carts was immediate and profound: Analysts estimate that shoppers buy on average one more item per visit when they have a shopping cart to put it in. Today few discount stores operate without them.
    The supermarket model of self-service was not new in 1960. What was new was how rapidly the discount format proliferated and dominated the general merchandise sector. Almost overnight discounters reversed the venerable retailing practice of offering customers precisely what they wanted. Rather, discounters offered customers what was available at the lowest possible price and positioned these goods in such a way—both physically and psychologically—as to convince customers they were getting the very best deal. The focus switched from the object to the deal: If the deal was good, the object under consideration became less critical to the transaction. Nearly half a century earlier, Frank W. Woolworth had set the stage for this parlor trick when he scoured the globe for almost anything cheap: hair ribbons, buttons, and poorly made wood-backed thermometers. Fifty years later the country had changed dramatically. Far fewer Americans lived on farms, and the great exodus from cities to suburbs was well under way. Advertising had transformed citizens into consumers, persuading them that wants were needs. But the discounting formula remained the same: Sell it cheap, buy it cheaper, and convince consumers that low price trumps all. A full-page 1960 advertisement placed by the long-defunct Des Moines Shoppers World Discount Department Store promotes its 36-inch dolls at $8.97, its transistor radios at $9.88, its bulky Orlon sweaters at $3.67, and 2-pound fruit cakes at 88 cents, but offers not a clue to the brand or provenance of these items. This motley assortment of merchandise seems almost flea market random, and it may well have been. The one constant is low price. As two business scholars of the time wrote, “Merchandising emphasis was predominantly on items that could be bought under exceptionally favorable circumstances, rather than upon planned assortments.”
    Planned assortments tailored toward the needs and desires of a particular clientele were a luxury that discounters could not afford. They could not have merchandise on the shelf that didn’t turn