#141 1916 · Piggly Wiggly (Clarence Saunders) · Grocery retailwrong-door
A Memphis grocer let customers walk the aisles and serve themselves, and clerks stopped being the bottleneck
the problem
Paying clerks to fetch every item for every customer was eating grocers' thin margins
background
Grocers in the 1910s ran on full service: a customer read a list to a clerk, who walked the stockroom gathering each item. It was slow, and the labor cost scaled with every customer served, at a time margins on packaged food were already thin. Saunders, a Memphis wholesaler and grocer, wanted to cut that cost, but a store that simply hired fewer clerks would just mean longer waits and worse service.
His answer restructured the transaction itself. He patented a store design — turnstile entry, a fixed aisle path past shelves of priced, branded goods, checkout at the exit — that let the customer do the browsing and picking a clerk used to do, and marketed it as a novelty rather than a downgrade: shoppers could see and touch everything in the store instead of asking for it.
the move
Clarence Saunders patented a store layout that turned shopping inside out: customers entered through a turnstile, walked a maze of aisles stocked with priced, pre-packaged goods, and picked their own items before paying at a checkout — the clerk's job shifted from fetching one customer's list to stocking shelves for all of them.
the payoff
The first Piggly Wiggly opened in Memphis in September 1916; Saunders began franchising the format within a year, and by 1923 the chain ran over 1,200 stores doing roughly $100 million in groceries — the self-service format every supermarket since has copied.
what came after
Saunders was not the literal first to try self-service, but his patented, franchisable version was the one that scaled — over 1,200 stores by 1923, and the template every modern supermarket, from Kroger to Walmart's grocery aisles, still runs on.
references
- [1]Tennessee Encyclopedia — Clarence SaundersTennessee Encyclopedia, 2018tennesseeencyclopedia.net
- [2]Economic Hardship Reporting Project — The Secret Anti-Socialist History of SupermarketsEconomic Hardship Reporting Project, 2022economichardship.org