The Invention of the Supermarket

A Not so long ago, buying groceries meant standing at a counter and asking for what you wanted. Behind the counter a shopkeeper or assistant would fetch each item in turn from shelves the customer could not reach, weigh out loose goods, add up the bill by hand and often write it down on credit to be settled later. Shopping was slow and personal; the shopkeeper knew the customers by name, chose much of what they bought and stood physically between them and the goods on the shelves. The pace of it all was leisurely by modern standards: a single customer might occupy an assistant for several minutes, discussing the week's needs, and a busy shop kept a number of assistants darting back and forth behind its long wooden counter. Shopping was as much a social occasion as an errand.

B The break with this ancient pattern came in 1916, in the American city of Memphis, when a grocer named Clarence Saunders opened a store he called Piggly Wiggly. Its novelty was startling. Customers passed through a turnstile, walked along aisles lined with clearly priced goods, took whatever they wanted from the shelves themselves and carried it to a checkout near the door to pay. Saunders had invented self-service, and he was proud enough of the idea to take out a patent on it. Contemporaries found the arrangement strange, even alarming; the sight of customers wandering freely among the stock, handling goods that no assistant had passed to them, overturned everything that shopkeeping had assumed for generations. Yet the crowds came, curious at first and then loyal.

C The new system spread quickly because it made sound commercial sense. A store in which customers served themselves needed far fewer assistants, and the savings could be passed on as lower prices, which in turn drew still more customers. Just as important, shoppers left free to wander among the shelves turned out to buy more than they had intended, picking up tempting items they would never have thought to ask an assistant for. Self-service, in other words, quietly encouraged buying on impulse. Retailers were quick to grasp how valuable this was. A shop that could tempt each customer into a handful of unplanned purchases would, over thousands of visits, sell a great deal more than one that merely handed over what was asked for, and the whole business of selling began to shift from serving demand towards creating it.

D Retailers soon learned to arrange their stores to make the most of this. Everyday staples such as milk and bread were placed at the back, so that customers had to walk the length of the shop, past hundreds of other products, in order to reach them. The most profitable goods were set at eye level, where they are easiest to notice and to reach, and eye-catching displays were built at the ends of the aisles. Little about the layout of a modern supermarket is accidental; almost all of it is designed to keep shoppers moving, and buying. Even the width of the aisles and the music played overhead have been studied for their effect on how long people linger and how much they place in their baskets. The modern shop is, in a quiet way, a carefully engineered machine for selling.

E The rise of self-service changed far more than the way people shop. With no assistant to describe or recommend a product, each item now had to sell itself directly from the shelf, and so the look of the packaging and the strength of the brand name became enormously important. Manufacturers poured effort into striking boxes and memorable labels, and the whole modern culture of packaging and branding grew, in large part, out of the simple decision to let customers help themselves. In this sense the supermarket did not merely change where people bought their food; it changed the whole relationship between shoppers and the things they buy, putting the product, and its packaging, at the very centre of the transaction where the shopkeeper had once stood. Today the same logic governs online shopping too, where the arrangement of a screen has replaced the arrangement of the shelves, but the founding insight remains the one Saunders stumbled upon in Memphis: that customers left to choose for themselves will, more often than not, choose to buy a little more. In little more than a century, self-service has spread from a single curious store to become, quite simply, the way the world shops.