As this new brand of consumerism began taking the U.S. by storm, a senior engineer at a local manufacturing company, who had just spent 25 years perfecting the walk-behind floor scrubber for the construction industry, had an aha moment.

“What if I built a walk-behind floor scrubber, but without the scrubber, to collect shopping carts in the parking lot and push them back to the store. It would revolutionize shopping cart retrieval!”

And just like very other inventor with a bold new idea, our engineer, started eating, sleeping, and engineering the Shopping Cart Pusher, the ultimate solution for collecting and transporting shopping carts. He recruited his two sons to help him build a prototype to find out if grocery store executives would embrace his new idea.

The first son said, “I took the prototype out to all the local food chains that owned 12 to 15 stores. They loved the concept. I left my first demonstration with a purchase order for five units. I delivered the five, then visited another group of grocery stores, and gave the same demonstration. I got an order for ten more.”

The second son said, “After we got the first ten orders, I turned my eight-car heated garage into our production facility. The first year we sold one hundred units. The next year we tripled that.”

A Great Idea Becomes a Global Business

Within five years, this start-up attracted the interest of Costco, Walmart, Target, and the Food Marketing Institute. Our engineer went back to the drawing board and prototyped solutions for pushing everything else on wheels.