In 1930, the first supermarket that looked something like modern supermarkets opened in Queen's, New York. Patrons often thought of these drive-ins as a single business, even though each subset was independently owned. The more important ancestor of the supermarket was the "drive-in," where independently-owned grocers, bakers, butchers, and produce vendors would set up shop in a common space, sharing a large, free parking lot, and allowing customers to get all of their shopping done in one place. Prior to the 1930s, shoppers in the United States generally had to travel to several different locations to buy the different foods they needed.Īs early as the 1920s, some grocers began to experiment with offering meat counters or small produce sections. At the time, the word "grocer," like "butcher," "baker" or "produce vendor." While shoppers would go to butchers to buy meat and bakers to buy bread, they would go to grocers to buy dry goods, like flour, sugar, coffee, and canned items. Grocer + Baker + Produce Vendor + Butcher = Supermarket The transition to self-service model allowed grocers to operate more efficiently by replacing the need for large numbers of clerks with only a few cashiers. On that date in 1916, the first Piggly Wiggly store opened its doors in Memphis, Tennessee, with the radical idea that stores could save money by putting their stocks on shelves and allowing the public to wander through them, gathering their selections in a basket and paying before they left.īefore Piggly Wiggly introduced its self-service system, shoppers would provide their grocery lists to store clerks, who would gather the items from stock shelves on their behalf. September 6, 2011, was the 95th birthday of the self-service shopping experience born in the United States and now common throughout much of the world. Ability to offer various kinds of food, like produce, meats, and dry goods, all under the same roof.Customers gather their own groceries from shelves and then pay at a centralized cashier. Its key defining features, relative to older American shopping models, are: With that in mind, here's a short history of the evolution of the quintessential American shopping phenomenon. This, in turn, has caused the media to pay attention to the distribution of supermarkets across the country, as their presence is a major determining factor in defining food deserts.īut, as Earth Eats pointed out, this emphasis on supermarkets is not without its problems.įew have commented on the relative novelty of the supermarket phenomenon, however. Michelle Obama's Let's Move! campaign has shone a new light on food deserts throughout 2010 and the first half of 2011.
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