Before self-checkout grocery shopping was a much more social experience. In the early 20th century you couldn’t go to the store to buy groceries without talking to a grocery clerk. Unlike cashiers who simply checked out your groceries and sent you on your way store clerks did the shopping. Customers would hand over their shopping lists and eventually receive a bag full of whatever items they requested. While some modern grocery store counters are still staffed by an employee (like the bakery for example) this “full-service” model gave way to the “self-service” model. (Ironically the closest you’ll get to grocery shopping in the 1900s today is probably Instacart.) Now most people can walk into a store and grab whatever they want—sometimes without talking to anyone else. And it’s all thanks to a company with one of the strangest-sounding names ever to grace a grocery store sign: Piggly Wiggly.
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 Memory Mountain | 2022-07-01 21:14:39 |  9,055 Views |
Piggly Wiggly – INCREDIBLE the FIRST SUPERMARKET
The first self-service supermarket in the United States—and the forerunner of today’s retailers—was founded in 1916 by Clarence Saunders in Memphis Tennessee. Dissatisfied with time-consuming expensive and clerk-operated stores he invented Piggly Wiggly where customers shopped for their own groceries initially using hand baskets and eventually the first shopping carts. Piggly Wiggly was a quick success so Saunders franchised it. By 1922 there were 1200 stores nationwide.
Of course the shockingly successful new approach to grocery shopping wasn't the strangest thing about Saunders' store; that would be the name. And more than 100 years later the mystery behind the origins of "Piggly Wiggly" continues to puzzle shoppers.
Over the years there have been many explanations for the name Piggly Wiggly. And while the mystery remains unsolved that hasn't stopped people from speculating. The store's website is even home to some speculation of its own: "One story says that while riding a train [founder Clarence Saunders] looked out his window and saw several little pigs struggling to get under a fence which prompted him to think of the rhyme." Memphis historian Mike Freemen has also taken a stab at the origin of the name and gives this story some credit. In his book "Clarence Saunders and the Founding of Piggly Wiggly" he suggests that it may have been coined from a combination of an old nursery rhyme that begins "Higgledy piggledy my fat hen" and "Uncle Wiggily's Adventures" a children's story that regularly appears as a comic strip in a local newspaper.
