Reading passage
The modern supermarket, with its wide aisles, shopping trolleys and open shelves, is so familiar that it is easy to forget how recent an invention it is. For most of retail history, customers stood at a counter and asked a clerk to fetch each item from shelves behind them. This system was slow and labour intensive and, crucially, it prevented shoppers from touching or comparing goods before they bought them.
The breakthrough came in 1916, when Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis, Tennessee. Saunders patented a layout in which customers entered through a turnstile, collected a basket and walked along a fixed route past shelves stocked with clearly priced goods. Shoppers selected items themselves and paid at a checkout near the exit. Because the store needed far fewer clerks, Saunders could charge lower prices, and customers responded enthusiastically. Within six years, more than one thousand Piggly Wiggly stores were operating across the United States.
Self service changed not only how shops were staffed but also how products were sold. When goods sat on open shelves rather than behind a counter, their packaging had to do the persuading. Manufacturers responded with brighter labels, recognisable logos and brand names designed to catch the eye of a passing shopper. Marketing historians credit the supermarket with accelerating the rise of national brands, since a distinctive package could now sell itself without a clerk's recommendation. Impulse buying also became possible: studies later showed that a large share of supermarket purchases were unplanned.
Supermarket designers quickly learned to exploit shopper psychology. Essential items such as milk and bread are usually placed at the back of the store, forcing customers to walk past hundreds of other products. Goods with the highest profit margins are shelved at eye level, while sweets and magazines surround the checkout, where tired shoppers are most vulnerable to temptation. Even the size of the trolley matters: research in the United States found that doubling trolley size encouraged customers to buy considerably more.
The format spread internationally after the Second World War. In Britain, the London Co-operative Society opened a self service store in 1942, but wider adoption came in the 1950s, when rising car ownership allowed shoppers to buy in bulk and carry groceries home. Refrigeration played a part as well, because households with fridges could store perishable goods for longer, making large weekly shops practical. By the 1960s, purpose built supermarkets with car parks were appearing on the edges of towns across Europe, often on cheap land that allowed enormous floor space.
Economists point out that the supermarket's real achievement was logistical. Centralised distribution centres, standardised barcodes introduced in the 1970s, and computerised stock control allowed chains to track every item from supplier to shelf. The first product ever scanned with a barcode, a packet of chewing gum, was sold in Ohio in 1974. These systems cut waste, reduced theft and, above all, lowered prices. In the United States, the share of household income spent on food fell steadily through the second half of the twentieth century, a decline many analysts attribute partly to supermarket efficiency.
The model has not been without critics. Small independent grocers, unable to match chain prices, closed in large numbers, and some town centres lost their food shops altogether. Concerns have also been raised about the buying power of the largest chains, which can demand deep discounts from farmers and food processors. More recently, self checkout machines have automated away many of the remaining cashier jobs, and retailers are now testing stores with no checkouts at all, where cameras and sensors bill shoppers automatically as they leave.
Whether this final step will succeed remains to be seen. Early trials of cashierless stores have proved expensive to run, and some customers still prefer human contact. Yet the direction of travel seems clear. A century after Saunders patented his turnstile, the self service principle he pioneered continues to reshape not only grocery retail but also banks, petrol stations and airports, anywhere, in fact, where customers can be persuaded to do the work themselves.