“Supermarkets played a huge role in our economy and the development of our society and now there are other things sharing that spotlight.”īut while the history and legacy of supermarkets is clear, one thing is not: How Piggly Wiggly got its peculiar name. “It’s a continuous thing, a continuous movement of where people shop and how they like to shop, he says. Of course, as technology changed the game inside the store, it changed the game outside, too, with online grocery shopping escalating in popularity so much that more than a third of online shoppers are expected to buy their groceries online in 2016. That idea has continued all the way from early 20th-century signs to electronic systems that individually identify shopped in the store in order to advertise to them personally.
“The whole idea of in-store merchandising became important with Piggly Wiggly,” Stanton says. The Queen was reportedly “bemused by the grocery cart’s little collapsible seat,” saying “it is particularly nice to be able to bring your children here.”Ĭhildren in supermarkets drastically changed the game of branding, with designers able to place food at kids’ eye levels, making it easy for them to woo their parents into various purchases. It was such a marvel that in 1957, during a visit with President Eisenhower, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited a Maryland grocery store for 15 minutes to see what it was all about. Throughout the ‘50s, the supermarket proved itself an American phenomenon, Stanton says.
PIGGLY WIGGLY BUSH LA FREE
After the war, the popularity of refrigerators and automobiles for nearly every household kept feeding the model, so much so that free parking became a necessity at every supermarket. For supermarkets, losing one or two people didn’t put the chains out of business. Supermarket success continued to prove fruitful during World War II when thousands of small grocery stores had to close as their employees went off to war. In addition to launching the self-service model, Piggly Wiggly introduced shopping baskets, price-marked items, employees in uniform and the supermarket franchise model.
Saunders redesigned food shopping, methodically arranging things in order to appeal to how customers shopped-for example, putting candy and other impulse items at the checkout. It’s really the origin of branding,” says John Stanton, a professor of food marketing at Saint Joseph’s University. “That meant consumers could make decisions as to what it was they wanted to buy, and that really led to companies trying to catch consumers’ attention.
At Piggly Wiggly, on the other hand, the shoppers did their own choosing-and the products had to do the tempting. At an old-style grocery, customers would pass a grocery list to a clerk, who would then put items together for shoppers in one bag. 11, 1916 in Memphis, Tenn.-after a few construction delays, which is why the company celebrates the anniversary on the 6th-and thus pioneered a self-service model that was drastically different from the way things had long been done. And that was far from the only thing that changed when Piggly Wiggly, the first modern American supermarket, opened 100 years ago.Ĭlarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly on Sept. Picking up a basket while grocery shopping may seem second nature now, but the idea was once groundbreaking.
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