September 6 is generally considered the birthday of the supermarket’s invention. Obviously the first supermarket has opened in America, a Memphis, nel Tennessee. In 1911, one hundred and ten years ago.
He was called Piggly Wiggly (there are still several hundred in the United States, but no longer the first). The novelty was remarkable: until that day to go shopping, a customer would show up with a list of things to buy, deliver it to the grocer and after a while he received everything in exchange stacked neatly in an envelope. This means that you had to decide first what to buy and then you couldn’t change your mind: he was in charge of the “shopping list”. Also Clarence Saunders was a grocer but he understood that there was another way to shop and that way people bought more things, you could add them until the last moment before paying, perhaps inspired by the fact that you had seen a product you wanted. This also involved a radical change in the shops, because the shelves where to expose the merchandise became important according to criteria aimed at making us buy more products (still today, as then, there are sweets and other similar things near the checkouts).
Clarence Saunders “changed the way we shop,” the Encyclopedia of Tennessee proudly says, the only one where you can find a complete biography of the protagonist born in a poor family but who had made a certain career as a salesman. At 30 he launches his supermarket (will really open on September 11th) and immediately has a huge success: customers like to shop in this way and he manages to keep the prices lower than the competition precisely because fewer salespersons are needed, Time notes.
In 1923 in the United States c’erano 1268 Piggly Wiggly, which soon went public on the New York Stock Exchange but things did not go as hoped and Saunders lost everything and was forced to file for bankruptcy. He left with a new supermarket chain that bore his name but when the crisis of ’29 came it failed again trying from then on to invent new ways of shopping automated by technology but they were not successful. However, he went down in history as the person who led the way of shopping in the twentieth century.
In the 1950s, after World War II, when the American way of life spread throughout the Western world, supermarkets also arrived in Europe where they were greeted with genuine wonder. To the point that in 1957, during the visit of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to the United States, the two stopped for 15 minutes to visit a supermarket in Maryland and the queen, according to Time, was particularly admired by the trolley with the seat retractable for children. Even supermarkets at some point in our history changed the world.
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