His design had a pair of large wire baskets connected by tubular metal arms with four wheels.

[6] His father worked at various dry goods stores owned by his wife's family, one of which was located in Indian territory where Sylvan was born.

Despite reaping a generous and timely sum from the Safeway sale, Goldman and his brother lost much of their fortune in the crash; and being banned from competing with Safeway in Tulsa due to a non-competition agreement, they moved to Oklahoma City where they purchased five grocery stores and formed a new company called Standard Grocery.

[6] They soon implemented the lessons they had learned in Tulsa and with their profits purchased the faltering Humpty-Dumpty grocery store chain in 1934.

With the assistance of a mechanic named Fred Young, Goldman constructed the first shopping cart, basing his design on that of a wooden folding chair.

Another mechanic, Arthur Kosted, developed a method to mass-produce the carts by inventing an assembly line capable of forming and welding the wire.

The cart was awarded patent number 2,196,914 on April 9, 1940 (Filing date: March 14, 1938), titled, "Folding Basket Carriage for Self-Service Stores".

After hiring several male and female models to push his new invention around his store and demonstrate their utility, as well as greeters to explain their use, his folding-style shopping carts became extremely popular and Goldman became a multimillionaire by collecting a royalty on every folding design shopping cart in the United States.

[9] Other inventions by Goldman include the grocery sacker, the folding inter-office basket carrier, and the handy milk bottle rack.

He gave time and money to the National Conference of Christians and Jews at the Southwest Center for Human Relations at the University of Oklahoma.