Clarence Saunders - The American Who Invented The Grocery Store

Shopping Carts, Serpentine Store Layouts, Automated Checkouts, Cash Payments. Clarence Saunders put everything together for the first time and openned Piggly Wiggly in 1916.
Today, it’s hard to imagine buying groceries without a cart, without a cashier, without the serpentine layouts.
#inventions #supermarket #history #interestingfacts #food #business
The self-service concept, the machine printed receipt and numerous modern food retailing inventions that today still shape our ways of doing groceries.
Grocery stores in the pre-Piggly Wiggly days were staffed by clerks who fetched orders from behind a counter for their customers. Piggly Wiggly came from those observations - he thought he could set up a retail store and have people pick out their own merchandise, with maybe three employees.
Join us as we discover the life of Mr Saunders and his adventures.

[@haileydavis55]

That’s so sad they tried to make his business fail

[@billsharp3786]

Piggly Wiggly is a great memory from my childhood. Thanks for bringing those memories back.

[@jasong428]

Theft trends will cause a resurgence of old style retail.

[@mrlevhil]

More likely a push for more home delivery and fewer retail locations.

[@aegisofhonor]

Safeaway, another innovator in modern super markets opened a year earlier in 1915 with a self-service model. Though I think because Piggly Wiggly opened in a more heavily urbanized area, it was able to expand faster and catch on faster where as Safeway took a few more years for it's store innovations to catch up.

[@TheFoodInspector]

I did not know about him! Thank you!

[@TomJosephi]

My gransmother had a traditional grocery store and I helped her fill orders for the customers,

[@TheFoodInspector]

Would love to know more :-)

[@Epic_C]

I see this channel growing soon. Keep up the work on these interesting take on historical stories!

[@TheFoodInspector]

Thank you!!

[@atenindustries1131]

I prefer the traditional. Way less consumerism.

[@TheFoodInspector]

What way? I don't understand :-)

[@atenindustries1131]

@@TheFoodInspector it is not much practical but you go there and you just order what you want. If you just wonder around de supermarket you end up by taking stuff you don't need. When I worked in Angola we grabbed our canned goods from a warehouse. We just choose what we wanted, paid and a guy put the stuff in car.