Article
The first self-service grocery store was a radical bet that customers could be trusted to pick their own food
Before September 1916, you never touched the food you bought.
You walked into a grocery store, handed a list to a clerk, and waited while he gathered everything from the shelves — scooping flour from a barrel, slicing cheese from a wheel, weighing sugar into a paper bag. You saw your food for the first time when it arrived at the counter, wrapped and paid for. The idea that a customer could walk through a store, pick items off open shelves, and carry them to a checkout stand was considered absurd — stores would be robbed blind.
Then Clarence Saunders opened a tiny store at 79 Jefferson Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, and changed how the world shops — permanently.
Before Piggly Wiggly: the full-service grocery
In 1916, grocery shopping was a fundamentally different experience. A customer entered a store with a list, approached a counter, and recited their order to a clerk. The clerk — or often several clerks, each responsible for a different department (dry goods, produce, meat) — would walk the aisles collecting each item, bring them back to the counter, and tally the total. The customer paid, and left. It was labor-intensive, slow, and the store's profit margin depended on employing enough clerks to handle the rush.
This system had a hidden cost beyond wages: impulse purchasing was nearly impossible. A customer could only buy what they knew existed and had planned for. A shopper couldn't browse, couldn't discover a new brand of crackers, couldn't decide on a sudden craving — because they never saw the merchandise.
Clarence Saunders, a former farm boy who had quit school at 14 to clerk in a general store, noticed this inefficiency firsthand. By 1916 he had risen through the wholesale grocery business in Memphis and was convinced there was a better way. His insight was deceptively simple: let the customer do the work the clerk was doing, and pass the savings back. [^1][^2]
The radical bet
Saunders opened Piggly Wiggly on September 6, 1916 (though construction delays pushed the actual opening to September 11). [^3][^2] The store was tiny by modern standards, but it introduced features we now take for granted:
- Self-service shopping baskets (woven wood, not plastic)
- Open shelves where customers could see and touch every product
- Individual price marking on every item
- A maze-like, one-way aisle layout that steered every customer past every product
- Checkout stands at the exit, where a cashier rang up purchases
- Turnstiles at entrance and exit
On opening day, employees stocked shelves but refused to pick items for customers — anyone who wanted groceries had to gather them themselves. [^4] Customers had to learn how to shop — a skill nobody had needed before. They picked up a basket, walked through the aisles, selected their own items, and paid at the checkout. The system that seems obvious to us today was, in 1916, bewildering.
Industry predictions were dire. Competitors said the store would be looted. Shoplifting losses, they warned, would destroy any profit. But the math worked: the savings from eliminating clerks more than covered the theft, and impulse purchases — items customers bought because they saw them — boosted revenue dramatically. [^2]
"So people will ask that very question"
The name itself was a marketing innovation. Saunders never explained where "Piggly Wiggly" came from. One story: he saw piglets scrambling under a fence from a train window and the rhyming name stuck. When asked why he chose such an odd name, Saunders replied: "So people will ask that very question." [^4] He wanted — and got — a name people talked about and remembered.
The business was an immediate success. Saunders patented the self-service format (U.S. Patent #1,242,872, filed October 21, 1916, granted October 9, 1917) [^5] and began franchising. Within a few years, hundreds of Piggly Wiggly stores operated across the country.
What Piggly Wiggly invented (beyond self-service)
The chain's innovations went deeper than letting customers touch the merchandise. Historic-Memphis.com lists a remarkable set of "firsts" attributed to Piggly Wiggly: [^4]
| Innovation | What it replaced | |---|---| | Checkout stands | Clerks tallying at scattered counters | | Price marking every item | Negotiated or clerk-memorized prices | | High-volume/low-margin retailing | Low-volume/high-margin model | | Full line of nationally advertised brands | Mostly bulk/unbranded goods | | Refrigerated cases for produce | Room-temperature displays | | Uniformed employees | Whatever the clerk wore that day | | Patented store fixtures | Improvised shelving | | Franchising independent grocers | Company-owned stores only |
Almost every feature of the modern supermarket traces back to that one small store on Jefferson Avenue.
The rise, the fall, and the second act
Saunders became a millionaire. He built a pink marble mansion in Memphis (now the Pink Palace Museum and Planetarium, which houses a replica of the first Piggly Wiggly). But in 1923 he lost control of his company in a spectacular Wall Street battle — his attempt to corner the market in his own stock backfired, and he was forced into bankruptcy. [^1][^4]
He sold the unfinished mansion to the city and started over. He created the "Clarence Saunders Sole Owner of My Name Stores" chain — a second fortune. That also failed during the Great Depression. In 1937, at age 56, he tried again with Keedoozle, a fully automated store where shoppers inserted keys next to products and the machinery delivered items to a central checkout — essentially a giant vending machine. The machinery, which Saunders built himself, proved unreliable. [^4]
At the time of his death in 1953, he was working on a fourth concept, Foodelectric, which never opened.
Why it matters
Saunders' bet — that customers could be trusted to serve themselves — seems obvious in retrospect. But it's a reminder that the "obvious" features of modern retail were invented, one by one, by someone who saw a broken system and had the nerve to try something different.
Piggly Wiggly still exists: as of 2024, 503 independently owned franchised stores operate in 18 states, primarily in smaller Southern and Midwestern towns. [^2] The name, with its deliberately silly ring, is still being talked about — just as Saunders intended.
Every time you grab a shopping cart, pick a box off a shelf, or scan your own items at self-checkout, you're using an innovation Clarence Saunders bet his career on. It took a bankrupt grocery clerk who left school at 14 to see that the most efficient person to pick your food was you.
Sources:
[^1]: Clarence Saunders — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Saunders [^2]: Piggly Wiggly — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly [^3]: Piggly Wiggly, LLC — History page. https://www.pigglywiggly.com/history/ [^4]: Historic-Memphis.com — Piggly Wiggly: First Self-Service Grocery. https://historic-memphis.com/biographies/pigglywiggly/pigglywiggly.html [^5]: USPTO — Self-serving store patent #1,242,872 (Clarence Saunders, 1917). https://patents.google.com/patent/US1242872A/en [^6]: Wikimedia Commons — Interior of the original Piggly Wiggly store, Memphis, 1918 (public domain). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Piggly_Wiggly_store%2C_1918.png