Supermarket

• 1. Introduction

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  The supermarket is so familiar that most people stop seeing it. On the 4th of August 1930, inside a 6,000-square-foot former garage in Jamaica, Queens, a man named Michael J. Cullen opened a store he called King Kullen. He described it as "the world's greatest price wrecker". The people who walked in were overcome. Not with awe at architecture, not with wonder at spectacle, but at food. Cheap, abundant, right there. A generation earlier, almost none of this would have been possible.

  How did a society that spent fully one-third of its budget on food manage to cut that number nearly in half within a single decade? Who were the people who built this new kind of store, and who fought against it? And what hidden logic governs the floors you walk, the shelves you scan, the checkout counter you queue at? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The World Before

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  In 1812, close to ninety percent of Americans worked in food production. The food they grew was often scarce, frequently poor in quality, and capable of killing people outright through disease. Buying food in the early twentieth century meant visiting a clerk who stood behind a counter, fetching items from shelves you were not permitted to approach. Merchants did not post prices. Every purchase involved negotiation, and the price you paid depended in part on the clerk's read of your social standing.

  Early grocery stores were described at the time as "austere", and tiny by any modern measure. Some carried as few as 450 items. Getting a week's worth of food might mean separate visits to a greengrocer, a butcher, a bakery, a fishmonger, and a dry goods store. Milk with a short shelf life arrived by delivery from a milkman. The system was slow, labor-intensive, and expensive. These small retailers were the final links in what one observer called "a long and tortuous food chain".

  The model was not uniquely American. It traced back millennia across Europe. Many shoppers of that era regarded the corner store visit as "a social occasion", pausing for conversations with staff and neighbors. But the social warmth came at a price: the average urban family in the 1920s spent fully one-third of its budget on food.

• 3. Early Experiments

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  Vincent Astor was one of the first to imagine a different way. In 1915 he invested $750,000 of his own fortune into a 165-foot by 125-foot open-air market at the corner of 95th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. The Astor Market sold meat, fruit, produce, and flowers. Astor expected customers to come from miles around. In practice, drawing people even ten blocks away proved nearly impossible. The market closed in 1917.

  The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, better known as A&P, had been operating since 1859. By the 1920s it was a familiar presence across North American cities. But A&P and chains like it still did not sell fresh meat or produce. Their answer to the inconvenience of multiple store visits was the "combination store": several departments under one roof, still relying on clerks to pull products from shelves upon request. By 1929, only one in three U.S. grocery stores had even reached this level of integration.

  The self-service idea had meanwhile been pioneered separately. In 1916, an entrepreneur named Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis. Saunders was awarded several patents for the innovations he built into these stores. The concept was a financial success, and Saunders franchised it. He had given the world self-service, uniform stores, and nationwide marketing. What remained was the final and defining ingredient: radically low prices.

• 4. King Kullen and the Birth of Cheap Food

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  The Food Marketing Institute, working with the Smithsonian Institution and funding from H.J. Heinz, eventually defined what separated a true supermarket from its predecessors: self-service, separate product departments, discount pricing, marketing, and volume selling. By that standard, the first true American supermarket was King Kullen, opened by Michael J. Cullen on the 4th of August 1930 in Jamaica, Queens.

  Cullen was a former Kroger employee. The store's layout was designed by Joseph Unger, who originated the practice of customers using baskets to collect goods before paying at a counter. Everything in the store had prices clearly marked, ending the need to haggle. The operating principle was simple: "pile it high and sell it cheap". Industry experts of the time called stores like it "cheapy markets", a label that was eventually replaced by the more favorable term "super market", which then closed into the single word we use today.

  Southern California chains Alpha Beta and Ralphs, as well as Texas-based Weingarten's and Henke and Pillot, also had strong claims as early entrants. By 1930, both Alpha Beta and Ralphs were operating multiple 12,000-square-foot self-service stores. But their prices had not yet fallen to King Kullen's levels, and their main selling point was free parking. Cheap food was the qualifying criterion, and on that measure the Jamaica, Queens garage won the designation. At the time of Cullen's death in 1936, seventeen King Kullen stores were operating.

• 5. A Revolution Under Pressure

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  Kroger and Safeway initially resisted Cullen's model. The Great Depression ended that resistance. American consumers became price-sensitive at a level no previous era had produced, and the established chains had no choice but to follow. Kroger went further, pioneering the first supermarket surrounded on all four sides by a parking lot.

  For A&P, then the largest grocery chain in the country, the conversion was wrenching. The armies of retail clerks who had been the public face of the old slow-and-social shopping experience were replaced by specialized workers: stock clerks, typically male, keeping shelves filled; cashiers, typically female, assisting shoppers at checkout. The transformation was immediate and measurable. Big Bear, one of King Kullen's earliest imitators, opened in New Jersey in 1933 and collected more revenue in one year than over a hundred A&P stores combined.

  By 1937, forty-four percent of A&P stores were losing money. By 1938, A&P had opened over 1,100 supermarkets of its own. By February 1940, it had closed 5,950 of its traditional grocery stores. In A&P's old-style stores, wages and overhead had consumed eighteen percent of sales. In its new supermarkets in the same neighborhoods, those same costs fell below twelve percent. The percentage of disposable income that American consumers spent on food fell from twenty-one percent in 1930 to sixteen percent in 1940. The number of American supermarkets grew from roughly 1,200 across 32 states in 1936 to over 3,000 across 47 states in 1937, and surpassed 15,000 by 1950.

  Not everyone welcomed the shift. Cambridge economist Joan Robinson had proposed the concept of "monopsony" in 1933, the idea that a single large buyer could outmaneuver a market of multiple sellers. Anti-chain campaigns seized on this language. Political pressure produced the Robinson-Patman Act in 1936, designed to prevent large chains from using buying power to disadvantage small stores. The act was not well enforced and had limited practical effect.

• 6. Taking the Format to the World

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  By the 1950s, the supermarket was a fixture of American daily life but was nearly unknown everywhere else. Most people outside the United States had never entered one or even heard the word. That changed in 1956, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture staged an "American Way exhibit" at the International Food Congress in Rome, Italy. The exhibit was described at the time as a "modest staging": roughly 2,500 items, far fewer than a full-size American supermarket. Even so, the conference attendees, Italian visitors, and international press were stunned by what one account described as "mountains of food".

  The following year, 1957, the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Association of Food Chains organized a larger event called Supermarket USA at the Zagreb International Trade Fair in what was then Yugoslavia. That exhibit covered 10,000 square feet and featured 4,000 consumer items, described as "the first fully operational American-style supermarket in a communist country". Both the Rome and Zagreb exhibitions were deliberate instruments of Cold War propaganda, deploying the abundance of the Western Bloc against the perceived scarcity of the Eastern Bloc.

  Canada had adopted the format in parallel with the United States throughout the 1930s. Quebec's first supermarket opened in 1934 in Montreal under the Steinberg's banner. In the United Kingdom, progress was slower. In 1947 there were just ten self-service shops in the entire country. That changed partly because of Patrick Galvani, an ex-U.S. Navy sailor and son-in-law of the Express Dairies chairman, who pitched the idea to that company's board in 1951. The UK's first Premier Supermarkets location opened in Streatham, South London, taking in ten times as much revenue per week as the average British general store. The number of British supermarkets grew from roughly 50 in 1950 to 572 by 1961, and exceeded 3,400 by 1969. After Galvani lost a bid to Tesco's Jack Cohen in 1960 to acquire 212 stores of the Irwin's chain, consolidation produced what came to be called "the big four": Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's, and Morrisons.

• 7. The Architecture of Influence

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  Fresh produce is placed at the front of the store deliberately. The signal it sends, of health and freshness, is meant to shape the shopper's mood before they reach a single packaged item. Bread and milk, by contrast, are placed at the rear, forcing customers to travel the full circuit of the store in order to reach the things they came to buy most often.

  Supermarkets dedicate thirty to forty feet of floor space to the bread aisle alone. Each product section, including fresh produce, dairy, the deli, meat, and the bakery, is given distinct floor coverings, lighting, and sometimes its own service counter, creating the impression of multiple smaller markets contained within one large one. Cheap generic brands occupy the lowest shelves. Products aimed at children are placed at mid-thigh level. The most profitable brands land at eye level.

  Some research suggests that shoppers who move through a store in a counter-clockwise direction spend more money. Other researchers argue that clockwise movement helps shoppers build better mental maps of the store, leading to higher sales. The disagreement has produced a practical split: most supermarkets place their entrance on the right-hand side, but some place it on the left so that shoppers naturally turn right upon entry and complete a full counter-clockwise circuit before reaching the checkouts. Along the way, high-impulse and high-margin products are positioned in the most visible areas. End-of-aisle displays are valuable enough that manufacturers pay significant sums to secure placement there.

  At the checkout, small displays of candy, magazines, and drinks fill the waiting time and extract one more purchase from shoppers who have already decided they are finished.

• 8. The Supermarket Today

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  ActionAid estimated in a 2007 report that 32 million people shopped in British supermarkets every week. In the United States at a recent count, approximately 38,000 supermarkets were operating, and Americans spent $701 billion at them in a single year. The average American adult will spend two percent of their entire life inside a supermarket.

  Traditional supermarkets in many countries now face competition from discounters such as Aldi and Lidl, which typically operate without union labor and with stronger buying power. Warehouse clubs such as Costco offer savings to shoppers buying in bulk. In Australia, the rising market share of Aldi has forced Woolworths and Coles to cut prices and expand their private-label ranges. Critics argue that the chains' practice of selling loss leaders is anti-competitive, and that the negotiating power of large multinationals over global suppliers raises further concerns.

  Online retail has opened a new front. During the dot-com boom, an online-only supermarket called Webvan launched and went bankrupt after three years before being acquired by Amazon. The British firm Ocado, which uses a high degree of warehouse automation, became the first successful online-only supermarket. Ocado subsequently expanded into providing services to other chains, including Waitrose and Morrisons. Micro-fulfillment centers, compact automated warehouses that prepare orders for pickup or home delivery, are now a significant investment priority for the industry, seen by many as the key to profitable online grocery fulfillment. The same self-service logic that Clarence Saunders patented in Memphis in 1916 continues to evolve, now with robots moving the baskets.