Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

by John Brooks

He sold that after a few years, did a stint as a wholesale grocer on his own, and then, in 1919, began to build a chain of retail self-service markets, to which he gave the engaging name of Piggly Wiggly Stores. (When a Memphis business associate once asked him why he had chosen that name, he replied, “So people would ask me what you just did.”) The stores flourished so exuberantly that by the autumn of 1922 there were over twelve hundred of them. Of these, some six hundred and fifty were owned outright by Saunders’ Piggly Wiggly Stores, Inc.; the rest were independently owned, but their owners paid royalties to the parent company for the right to adopt its patented method of operations. In 1923, an era when a grocery store meant clerks in white aprons and often a thumb on the scale, this method was described by the New York Times with astonishment: “The customer in a Piggly Wiggly Store rambles down aisle after aisle, on both sides of which are shelves. The customer collects his purchases and pays as he goes out.” Although Saunders did not know it, he had invented the supermarket.