Before there were supermarkets, buying groceries was a one-on-one affair: A customer handed the grocery list to a clerk, who went into a back storage area to retrieve the goods. Shoppers had scant opportunity to select one apple over another or even to inspect the beef steaks they would get for supper. They were subject to the whims of the fishmonger or fruit seller and the favoritism of an autocratic butcher. The death knell of such full-service grocery shopping sounded in Memphis, Tennessee, on September 6, 1916, when Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly store. Saunders moved the stock room to the front of the sales area and, calling the configuration a “self-serving store,” invited customers to enter through a turnstile (a device Saunders was the first to use in retail sales), walk among the aisles, and select their own goods. A new way to shop was born.
At first, meats and produce were not part of the inventory, which was strictly nonperishables. Despite Time magazine’s concern that Saunders’s new system provided “latitude to shoplifters,” it was an immediate success. For the customer, it meant the end of waiting in line to be helped. Store owners were thrilled to have a dozen or more people shopping at one time. Self-serving stores, also known as cafeteria groceries, were a shot in the arm for the retail food business, suddenly introducing the opportunity to create enticing displays of merchandise that encouraged impulse buying.
Within five years there were over a thousand Piggly Wigglies in twenty-nine states, but it wasn’t until August 4, 1930, that the supermarket earned its moniker. As the Great Depression weighed upon consumers, Mike Cullen suggested to his boss at Kroger grocery stores that he consider opening really large self-serving markets in low-rent locations, offering cut-rate products in order to attract budget-conscious customers. Kroger wasn’t interested, so Cullen quit. He found an abandoned garage in Jamaica, Long Island, stocked it with groceries, and placed newspaper ads touting King Kullen Market as “The World’s Greatest Price Wrecker.” Many items were sold at cost. Cullen was the first to recognize the potential symbiosis of cars and supermarkets (which blossomed with the growth of suburbia); he offered a parking lot, thus encouraging customers to purchase carloads of bargain groceries. The store’s selection was of unprecedented scope, including not only meat, vegetables, and canned, boxed, and frozen food, but also soaps, small appliances, and pharmaceuticals. It was the first true supermarket, as well as a harbinger of big box stores and warehouse clubs.
Grocery shopping was once again revolutionized in 1937, when an Oklahoma City grocer named Sylvan Nathan Goldman, inspired by the design of a folding chair, patented a carrier that would hold two full-size carry baskets and rolled easily through the aisles. Although customers did not instantly warm to the idea—most thought it seemed too much like a baby carriage—the “No Basket Carrying Plan” he introduced at his Humpty Dumpty chain encouraged customers to gather weeks’ worth of food in one swoop. (Beneficiary of royalties on every shopping cart sold until the patents expired, Goldman also invented the still-prevalent “Nest Kart” with a child seat at the push bars, folding back for easy storage. He also invented airport luggage carts.)
The cavernous, convenient supermarket now is as common around the globe as television, but for a long while it was considered uniquely American. Forward-looking citizens eager to escape their forebears’ way of life in urban ethnic neighborhoods or small towns saw the old way of shopping—butcher to baker to greengrocer—as a burdensome remnant of times gone by. All that effort and personal contact were signs of the era’s bête noire—being oldfashioned. As late as 1955, the Silver Jubilee Super Market Cook Book singled out the supermarket as nothing less than a beacon of national pride, “a symbol of America’s attainment of a high standard of living through democracy, so looked upon as one of the great institutions of the world.” The implication was that shoppers in less fortunate nations still bought their food like serfs, hat in hand, hoping Lord Grocer would treat them well. Here in America, everything was laid out: meat and produce prewrapped and ready to be freely inspected and chosen by the customer with no intervening authority.
It has long been a national tradition for counterculture values to seep into mainstream culture, a tide that flowed vigorously into late-twentieth-century food preferences. Peasant bread displaced once-aristocratic white bread as a status symbol; Ben & Jerry’s cloyingly folksy ice cream kicked snooty brands’ butts; former alternative fare such as granola and yogurt proliferated on supermarket shelves, reveling in their ostensible unrefinement. Concurrently, huge corporate supermarket chains prospered by positioning themselves as the alternative to huge corporate supermarket chains. In 2007, Whole Foods, which began as Saferway alternative grocery in Austin, Texas, in 1978, paid nearly $600 million to acquire Wild Oats, which began as the Crystal Market alternative grocery in Boulder, Colorado, in 1987. Such determinedly enlightened enterprises sell health-food products that once were the domain of smelly seed-and-sprout shops; they feature shelves devoted to dietary supplements and to books and pamphlets about composting and organic farming; they offer on-the-spot massages and nutrition clinics and, at the Whole Foods in West Hollywood, a “Lifestyle Store” that sells organic bedding to make one’s home “a haven from impurities” and “hip clothing from U2’s Bono for consumers with a conscience.”