The Duplicitous Nature of the Familiar Urban Object: the Shopping Cart at Bennett’s Food Market, Where Food Buying is Most Satisfactory

Abstract

When Sylvan Goldman invented the first shopping cart in the 1930s, it is unlikely he envisioned its eventual entrance into the rivers and swamps. Though advertised as a solution for the arm-weary shopper, the function was no doubt two-fold in truth: while the explicit function of the shopping cart was to ease the load for supermarket shoppers, the more implicit function was to ease them into buying more. However, the customers at Bennett’s Food Market in Kingston, Ontario – at the corner of Charles and Bagot through the early 1900s to the early 2000s – helped to turn those expectations upside down. Through an extensive collection of oral history interviews, The Swamp Ward and Inner Harbour History Project has catalogued the neighbourhoods’ long-standing relationship with carts, but also the long-standing relationship with the grocery store that provided them. By focusing in on what first appears as a familiar urban object and considering it specifically in the context of Bennett’s Food Market, the shopping cart is revealed as far more than a basket on wheels. Shopping carts can nurture people not just by being filled up with food that’s then bought and consumed, and they can support a weight that’s not just of groceries, but that’s human.