xxviiPrologue: Unlearning What’s Untrue
Humpty Dumpty stores in 1937 and patented by Goldman in 1940, the carts
became a local business success.
As the United States pulled out of World War II and the postwar recession,
the society became more afuent. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, people bought
cars, built suburban homes, and shopped at supermarkets and stadium-size
warehouses lled with a wide variety of goods. From a humble wooden con-
traption wheeled around in narrow aisles of a small grocery store, the shop-
ping cart turned into a steel workhorse of the world’s retail commerce worth
trillions of dollars a year. None of the large-scale all-you-can-buy shopping
experiences of today would be possible without Goldman’s invention that
broke ...