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The Innovation of Grocery
Stores
A
At
the
beginning
of
the
20th
century,
grocery
stores
in
the
United
States
were
full-service.
A
customerwould ask a clerk behind the
counter for specific itemand the clerk would
package the
items,
which
were
limited
to
dry
goods.
If
they
want
to
save
some
time,
they
have
to
ask
a
delivery
boy or by themselves to send the note of what they
want to buy to the grocery story
first and then goto pay for
the goods later. These grocery stores usually
carried only one brand of
each
good.
There
were
early
chain
stores,
such
as
the
A&P
Stores,
but
these
were
all
entirely
full-service and very time-consuming.
B
In 1885, a Virginia boy
named Clarence Saunders began working part-time as
a clerk in a grocery
store when he was
14 years old, and quit school when the shopkeeper
offered him Ml time work
with
room
and
board.
Later
he
worked
in
an
Alabama
coke
plant
and
in
a
Tennessee
sawmill
before he returned
to the grocery business. By 1900, when he was
nineteen years old, he was
earning
$$30
a
month
as
a
salesman
for
a
wholesale
grocer.
During
his
years
working
in
the
grocery
stores,
he
found
that
it
was
very
inconvenient
and
inefficient
forpeople
to
buy
things
because more than a century ago, long
before there were computers, shopping was done
quite
differently than it is today.
Entering a store, the customer would approach the
counter (or wait
for a clerk to become
available) and place an order, either verbally or,
as was often the case for
boys running
errands, in the form of a note or list. While the
customer waited, the clerk would
move
behind
the
counter
and
throughout
the
store,
select
the
itemson
the
list
—
some
form
shelves so high that
long-handled grasping devicehad tobe
used
—
and bring them back
to
the counter to be tallied and baggedor
boxed. The process might be expedited by the
customer
calling or sendingin the order
beforehand, or by the order being handled by a
delivery boy on a
bike, but otherwise
it did not vary greatly. Saunders, a flamboyant
and innovative man, noticed
that
this
method
resulted
in
wasted
time
and
expense,
so
he
came
up
with
an
unheard-of
solution that would revolutionize the
entire grocery industry: he developed a way for
shoppers to
serve themselves.
C
So in 1902 he
moved to Memphis where he developed his concept to
form a grocery wholesale
cooperative
and a full-
service grocery store. For
his new “cafeteria grocery”, Saunders divided his
grocery into three distinct areas:
1) A front “lobby” forming an entrance
and exit and checkouts a
t the front.
2) A sales department, which was
specially designed to allow customers to roam the
aisles and
select
their
own
groceries. Removing
unnecessary
clerks,
creating
elaborate
aisle displays,
and
rearranging the store to force
customers to view all of the merchandise and over
the shelving and
cabinets units of
sales department were “galleries” where
supervisors were allowed to keep an
eye
on the customers while not disturbing them. 3) And
another section of his store is the room
only
allowed
for
the
clerks
which
was
called
the
“stockroom”
or
“storage
room”
where
large
refrigerators
were
situated
to
keep
fresh
products
from
being
perishable.
The
new
format
allowed
multiple
customers
to
shop
at
the
same
time,
and
led
to
the
previously
unknown
phenomenon of
impulse shopping. Though this format of grocery
market was drastically different
from
its
competitors,
the
style
became
the
standard
for
the
modern
grocery
store
and
later