Made In America - Bill Bryson [138]
As foods and other household products became individually wrapped and more conveniently transportable, it was only a matter of time before someone thought of a new way of selling them. In 1916 Clarence Saunders of Memphis, Tennessee, hit on a novel proposition that he patented under the name the Self-Serving Store.
The first well-known grocery store chain in America was the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, founded in 1859. As the name suggests, it began as a tea importer, but it was stocking groceries as early as 1865. By the outbreak of World War I, A&P, as it was by then known, had 2,000 stores all over America.6 They were, however, stores of the old-fashioned type in which clerks fetched requested items from high shelves.
Clarence Saunders changed all that with his Memphis store. He called it a Piggly-Wiggly. When asked why he had given it such an odd name, he replied: ’That’s why – because it makes people curious!’ Customers entered through a turnstile, picked up a basket, made their selections and eventually arrived at the ‘settlement and checking’ desk, where the selections were ‘checked up’ and wrapped. A reporter for the New York Times, clearly agog at this revolutionary concept, described how a customer ‘rambles down aisle after aisle, on both sides of which are shelves. The customer collects his purchases and pays as he goes out.’ The motivation behind the stores was not so much to provide a convenience for the customers as to deal with a shortage of clerks occasioned by World War I. It soon became evident, however, that shoppers liked being able to squeeze the bread and handle the soup cans, and the idea took off in a big way.
Saunders lost control of Piggly-Wiggly while playing the stock market in 1923 and devoted his remaining years to an even more ambitious, but ultimately hare-brained, scheme called Keydoozle (for which read: ‘key does all’) Markets, a kind of automated grocery store in which the customers would make their selections by inserting keys into slots beside a specimen product. Behind the scenes an absurd assortment of clattering machinery and flapping conveyor belts would sort the products and carry them, bagged and ready to take home, to the checkout counter. The system never really worked, and no more was heard of Clarence Saunders.7
In one important respect, Saunders’s stores represented no advance on the old-style grocery stores. They were small, often no more than 1,500 square feet, with no more than three or four aisles. The credit for creating the first true supermarket is usually given to Michael Cullen, who opened a ‘grocery warehouse’ or ‘food market’ – he used either name freely – in Jamaica, New York, in 1930. It wasn’t the first big food store in America. As early as 1923 San Francisco had a grocery store called the Crystal Palace with parking for 4,350 cars*26 and 68,000 square feet of retail space. However, Cullen did offer several features that would become standard in the business – evening opening, self-service, strident advertising, and a practically irresistible impulse to put a misspelled word in the title. He called it King Kullen. The first company to use the word supermarket in its title appears to have been Albers Super Mkts., Inc., of Cincinnati, which registered the name in 1933.8 The same decade saw the development of an appliance to help shoppers deal with the increasing