Clarence Saunders was an American grocer that first developed the idea of a self-service retail store, leading to the idea of the supermarket. He developed major ideas that contributed to mass consumerism, such as self-service, uniform stores, and huge marketing ventures to increase sales.
Before Saunders, shoppers would go to stores and present their orders to clerks that would then give them the items from store shelves. Saunders saw this inefficiency, and thus created the revolutionary idea of self-service, allowing shoppers to pick out their own merchandise. Self-service also increased impulse purchases, as buyers would not think as much before offering their order to clerks, instead, they could grab whatever they wanted.
In 1916, Saunders launched the first self-service store, Piggly Wiggly. His store had cheaper prices, and replaced clerks with fully self-service stores, except for the checkout. There were also shopping baskets, and he created aisles so that customers would have to look at all the merchandise before checking out. Turnstiles were at the beginnings and ends of the stores in order to prevent people from leaving without paying. There was no fresh meat in the stores, but fresh produce was available.
Saunders created many patents, including his concept of the self-serving store, tagging items, and having a machine receipt of items bought. In 1921, there were 615 stores, growing to 1,267 stores in 1923. Piggly Wiggly peaked in 1932 with 2,660 stores and had annual sales of over $180 million.
Due to the success of Piggly Wiggly, many stores started to follow the self-service model as well, such as Jitney Jungle and Helpy Selfy. Although Saunders’s stores were somewhat close to the modern conception of the supermarket, historians often do not consider his stores as such. Piggly Wiggly still is running today as a supermarket chain, predominantly in the South.
Today’s stores are a direct result of Saunders’s original idea. Expanding items from not just daily household products, but also furniture and various other goods, manifesting in hypermarkets such as Costco and Walmart. People all over the world go to these stores to buy their goods, supplementing it with mail-orders services such as Amazon.
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Ethan, thank you for sharing this very interesting and relatable blog post. One such supermarket that comes to mind when I was reading is Safeway. In fact Safeway was founded in 1915 Marion Barton Skaggs. One interesting thing to note is that Safeway got its name from it's policy in which they would only accept cash. During a time period in which a majority of Americans would buy groceries with credit, Safeway operated on a cash and carry basis and thus was the "safe way" to spend because families could not get into debt, especially during The Great Depression.
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I think that this ties in in an interesting way with what we discussed about how the emergence of credit and buying things on credit also created a stronger culture of impulse purchases and consumers buying more in general. In the modern world, grocery stores have become even more focused on the consumer doing everything themselves, with as little interaction with the actual workers anymore with the growth of self-checkout. Needing less clerks to assist customers when they no longer had to get everything for them lead to less jobs then, so not needing to even check everyone out anymore may lead to less jobs in today's economy.
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I found the focus of transition from this post fascinating as it showed the transition from the old-fashioned style store to the modern process of choosing food and checking out at a cashier. Something I found interesting about Saunders himself was that he himself came to represent the effects of American life during the 20th century. Coming from an impoverished Virginia family, Sanders leveraged his position as a businessman and vision of the future of stores in order to develop his monopoly in Piggly Wiggly. However, as a result of the stock market crash and depression, Saunders was forced to file bankruptcy and restart his entire business after losing almost all of his assets. He later built up two other businesses, both of which failed due to economic recessions. Despite such failures, Saunders experimented and trail blazed the new developments of American consumerism, all while embodying the ideal of making it rich in America.
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Super cool blog post! I had no idea this was how our grocery stores came to be like this. Upon further research, I found that due to these self-service grocery stores, packaging and branding and labels on food items became much more important now that consumers could compare the items with other brands and choose for themselves. I was curious as to how he came up with the idea of self-service grocery stores and found that before he founded Piggly Wiggly, he was working in the grocery industry, but he wanted to cut the costs of having clerks to fill individual orders as they were very costly. Thus he decided to allow individuals to choose for themselves and be their own clerks.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bizarre-story-piggly-wiggly-first-self-service-grocery-store-180964708/
I had no idea that stores were organized this way prior to how we are used to them. Today everything is organized in a way that you can just grab and go, making it fast and efficient. It makes sense that if it wasn't organized this way, someone would see it and try to improve upon it. It would save a lot of time and money to organize stores the way we are used to it today. This would probably also have aided the rise of credit in stores, as so many more options were not just available but also visible right as you walked into and throughout the store. With something so much more time efficient, it makes sense why this idea completely transformed grocery stores and buying as we know it today.
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