Deli Associate

Wegman's Food Markets to break ground soon on new Cranberry Township location, first Wegman's in the Pittsburgh region. Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News Discover more Listen Live App News Subscription Service TV & Video (Cranberry Township, PA) Wegman's Food Markets will break ground on August 13th on its new location in Cranberry Township, which will mark the company's first store in the Pittsburgh region. The site at 5000 Cool Springs Drive will feature a facility of 115,000 square feet. The project is expected to create approximately 450 jobs for the local community. This expansion will bring the total number of Wegmans locations in Pennsylvania to 20, as the company currently operates 19 stores across the state. The store will feature departments for bakery, cheese, deli, produce, meat and seafood. Customers will also have access to a large selection of beer and wine as well as a market café which includes indoor and outdoor seating. The store has a targeted opening date in the fall of 2027.

July 28, 2026 - shopping carts. If you've shopped at the Pittsford or Penfield Wegmans lately, you may have noticed something different about the carts. Wegmans is piloting a redesigned shopping cart at these two local stores, and it's a bigger change than it might first appear. The most noticeable update is what Wegmans calls the New Basket Layout. Gone are the traditional two shallow tiered baskets stacked on top of each other. In their place is one deep basket up front and a smaller secondary basket near the handle. The new layout also makes room for family-pack items, which never quite fit right in the old tiered design. Small conveniences have been added too, including built-in cup holders and phone holders, so shoppers can keep a drink steady or glance at their grocery list without juggling anything. The updated carts are also easier to steer and noticeably quieter rolling through the aisles. But Wegmans isn't stopping at basket redesigns. At a store in Syracuse, they're testing something even more futuristic: AI-powered smart carts. It's a reminder that the humble shopping cart, something most of Legends1027 push without a second thought, is still evolving nearly ninety years after it was invented. Which seemed like the perfect excuse to dig into where the shopping cart actually came from. The folding chair that changed grocery shopping. The shopping cart traces back to June 4, 1937, and a man named Sylvan Goldman, who owned the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oklahoma. The 1930s were a decade of quiet technological revolution in everyday American life. Car ownership was climbing. Factories and stores were electrifying. Refrigerated transportation was expanding, and the tractor was transforming agricultural output. Together, these shifts helped give rise to something new: the self-service supermarket, where shoppers browsed and picked out their own goods instead of handing a list to a clerk. Goldman noticed a problem this created. Women shopping at his stores tended to stop buying once their handheld baskets got too full or too heavy. If shoppers could carry more, they'd buy more. So Goldman set out to solve it. Working with a mechanic named Fred Young, Goldman built the very first shopping cart using an unlikely blueprint: the folding chair. They welded together a metal frame, added wheels, and attached wire baskets, creating a rolling contraption that could pivot around store aisles. It wasn't perfect. The prototype had an unfortunate habit of folding up entirely when it hit an obstacle, and tipping over when shoppers tried to round a corner. Convincing shoppers to actually use it. Here's the part of the story most people don't know: shopping carts were a hard sell at first. Men reportedly found them effeminate. Women weren't thrilled either, since pushing one felt a little too close to pushing a baby carriage. Goldman's brilliant invention was, for a while, a flop. So Goldman got creative. He took out newspaper ads and hired male and female models to stroll around his stores pushing carts, casually demonstrating how useful they were. He stationed greeters at the entrance to explain the concept to confused customers. It worked exactly the way he hoped: once shoppers saw other people using the carts, they became far more willing to try one themselves. Within weeks, Goldman's carts were rolling through every one of his stores. Goldman went on to patent his design and collected a royalty on every folding shopping cart sold across the United States, eventually becoming a multimillionaire off an idea inspired by a folding chair. The next big upgrade: nesting carts. The next major leap came almost a decade later, in 1946, courtesy of an inventor named Orla Watson. Watson's innovation looked small on paper but changed everything in practice. He added a swinging rear gate that allowed carts to nest inside one another, saving enormous amounts of floor space for stores. He also combined the frame and basket into a single permanent unit, eliminating the need to assemble a cart before every use, which had been a hassle with Goldman's original design. From there, the shopping cart kept evolving. Child seats were added in the 1950s, giving parents somewhere to put a toddler instead of balancing them on a hip while shopping. Retractable seat belts for those seats followed around 1967, and by 1982 they had become standardized across the industry. The grimy truth about cart handles. Here's a fact that might make you reach for a sanitizing wipe next time you grab a cart: studies have found that shopping cart handles carry more germs than the average public restroom. The reasons are less than pleasant. Raw meat packaging can leak onto the handle and basket. Children in diapers are frequently seated right in the cart's child seat. And carts that sit outside are exposed to birds, rodents, and whatever else wanders through a parking lot. All of it adds up to a genuinely germ-covered handle, whether you're at a big box store or your neighborhood Wegmans. Shopping carts by the numbers. The scale of the shopping cart industry today is bigger than most people realize. At any given moment, there are an estimated 20 to 25 million shopping carts actively in use on retail sales floors across the United States. Not all of them stay put. Nearly 2 million shopping carts disappear or are stolen from stores every single year. That loss adds up fast. U.S. retailers spend roughly $175 million annually just replacing and repairing carts, and when you factor in the cost of retrieving stray carts from parking lots and neighborhoods, plus the staff time involved, broader industry estimates climb as high as $800 million. So the next time you push a Wegmans cart down the aisle, whether it's the classic model or one of the new redesigned ones in Pittsford and Penfield, you're rolling along with almost ninety years of surprisingly complicated history.