A 20-year Overnight Success Story

Twenty years ago, Minnesota embraced the warehouse-style grocery store concept. With wide aisles and stock packed to the ceiling, these super-stores sold merchandise in bulk packages, with sales volume to match. Shopping cart size grew to accommodate these new bigger consumer purchases.

Minnesota winters are tough and collecting shopping carts from the parking lot after a blizzard was challenging and potentially hazardous. Just picture one or two part-time high school student employees maneuvering 10-15 carts into one huge line, then pushing them up an incline back into the store in slushy ice and snow. Cart collection became the worst job in the supermarket… but, it had to be done 24/7.

shopping cart collection, OUR HISTORY

An AHA Moment!

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.

shopping cart collection, OUR HISTORY
shopping cart collection, OUR HISTORY

The First Demonstration

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.

shopping cart collection, OUR HISTORY
shopping cart collection, OUR HISTORY