Day: September 20, 2025

Purchased food, as opposed to home-grown or homemade, was an increasing part of Americans’ diet, especially for those who lived in cities during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Stocking up on groceries “was — and was understood to be — difficult, time-consuming, and important work,” historian Tracey Deutsch wrote in “Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century.”

Shoppers, often women, would have to haggle over price. Availability could be inconsistent, so a seller might run out of a necessary ingredient, making meal planning difficult. Traipsing from one store to another could take up a substantial part of the day.

Differences in race, ethnicity, and language among shoppers and sellers could add difficulty or friction to these tasks as well.

In the 1920s, grocery stores were tiny hubs of local activity. They were typically around 500 square feet, the size of some present-day apartments.

Most products were behind counters or in storerooms, and clerks would fetch the items and tell the customer the price. Shoppers had to trust that they were getting quality goods and a fair deal.

These stores usually operated on credit. Customers could put purchases on their tab and settle their accounts when their wages came in.

Shoppers might still need to buy produce and meat from separate shops or peddlers because grocery stores didn’t offer them.

Unlike small, independent stores, chains could buy lots of goods at lower prices, passing savings on to customers. This was especially attractive during the inflationary period that followed World War I, when potatoes cost 147% more in 1923 than they had a decade earlier.

Since smaller grocery stores often didn’t list their prices, chain stores seemed to offer more transparency. Some contemporary estimates found chains selling branded items for roughly 9% and 11.5% less than independent retailers.

Chain stores that started to gain success and recognition throughout this period included A&P and Kroger.

One of the first grocery chains in the US began as Gilman & Company in the 1850s and later became the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, better known as A&P. After the Chicago Fire in 1871, the company expanded outside of New York. Five years later, it had 100 stores.

By the 1930s, over 15,000 A&Ps were located throughout the country, making it the US’ largest grocery store chain.

One reason the company was able to expand so quickly was the introduction of its cash-and-carry economy stores in 1912. Instead of customers buying items on credit, they paid right away. Free delivery wasn’t offered at these stores, and they all had the same products and layouts. Most of the products were canned or shelf-stable, like flour, but small iceboxes held perishables including butter and eggs.

Economy A&Ps didn’t have to keep track of customer accounts, track down late payments, or spend time traveling around the city dropping off groceries. They were more efficient to open and run, leading to substantial growth.

“Although discounting was not a new idea, the economy store was an important building block on the way to the supermarket,” historian Benjamin Davison wrote in a 2016 journal article. A large number of customers wanted low prices over perks like personal attention and free delivery.

In the 1930s, some states started passing anti-chain bills over concerns they’d force mom-and-pop shops out of business. The more stores a company owned, the more they were taxed. A&P’s growth model was suddenly a lot less attractive.

In the 1920s, some independent retailers started embracing what was known as combination stores. They expanded into existing butcheries to sell meat to customers. Meanwhile, many chains relied on prepackaged food and couldn’t sell fresh produce or meat.

Kroger stores were an exception. Bernard H. Kroger started the Great Western Tea Company in 1883 in Cincinnati. As the chain expanded, so did its services. In 1901, some of its stores started baking their own bread. Three years later, the company purchased a meat packer to supply in-store meat departments.

Cutting out suppliers helped Kroger have more control over pricing. He told the New York Times in 1901 that he could sell bread for 2 cents, half the price of everyone else in the city. “He buys coffee by the ship load and browns it himself,” a man who had spoken with the grocery store founder told an Ohio newspaper the same year.

By 1925, the Kroger Grocery & Baking Co., as it was then known, was making over $116 million (over $2 billion today) in sales, the Wall Street Journal reported in 1926. It operated 2,858 stores and several bakeries for bread, crackers, and cakes.

Customers who entered a Piggly Wiggly went through a turnstile into an aisle lined with packaged foods. Unable to leave through the door they entered, they wound through the aisles, browsing goods with their prices prominently displayed. Employees might be restocking shelves, but they weren’t there to sell shoppers on the latest detergent or entice them with a bargain on bacon.

While that doesn’t strike today’s shopper as odd, to a reporter for the Boston Daily Globe in 1918, “the whole place is absolutely novel.”

Clarence Saunders had designed the first self-service Piggly Wiggly two years earlier in Memphis, Tennessee. Instead of having a clerk gather everyone’s items, the shoppers could pick and choose the brand of soap or type of soup they wanted themselves.

Flour, pickles, and other items were pre-weighed, so customers didn’t have to guess the final price or wait for an employee to help measure the right amount. That also meant there was no meat counter with a butcher slicing ham or packing up pork chops.

California and Montana had self-service stores pre-dating Piggly Wiggly. However, Saunders gained attention for his opening-day stunts, like handing out roses to redheaded women, and for patenting some of his stores’ designs, like the one-way layout that ended at the checkout station.

The unique name, which one trade magazine described as having a “Mother Goosey sound,” may have helped, too. Saunders seemed to purposefully shy away from explaining its origins.

Franchising the name and design helped expand the store’s reach quickly. By 1923, the US had over 1,200 Piggly Wigglys, most independently owned. That year, Saunders resigned after trying to raise the company’s stock price by buying shares.

In 1944, the Wall Street Journal reported that even industry experts couldn’t settle on a definition for supermarkets. Most agreed the stores had several departments — including produce, meat, and dairy — and the grocery areas were self-service. The Super Market Institute put the minimum sales volume at $200,000 a year (about $3.6 million today).

For some historians, all the pieces come together in Michael Cullen’s King Kullen. In 1929, he was managing a Kroger in Illinois when he wrote to the company’s president, William Albers, with an idea to create “monstrous” stores where goods would move quickly because they were priced with little markup. Thanks to the volume of items, they would still make a profit, he said. He predicted he’d sell $10,000 worth of groceries a week.

By saving the public $1 to $3 on their food bills, he wrote, “I would be the ‘miracle man’ of the grocery business.”

Albers never saw the letter, and Cullen instead opened his own store in Queens, New York, in 1930. He took out ads calling King Kullen the “world’s greatest price wrecker.” The warehouse’s 6,000 square feet held 1,000 items. Customers quickly started lining up.

In 1936, Cullen died after complications from an appendectomy. His wife took over the company, which had opened more than a dozen stores, which together made more than $6 million a year (more than $139 million today).

Three years after King Kullen announced itself as a price wrecker, Albers left Kroger to open his own eponymous stores, the first to use the term “super market” in its name.

Like A&P and Kroger, Ralphs started in the 19th century. In 1873, brothers George and Walter Ralphs started selling local produce and grains in Los Angeles. The business grew, and in 1926, it had over 40 stores. Many catered to Los Angeles’ commuters instead of relying on foot traffic.

Car ownership in the US grew by over 4,000% between 1910 and 1930, especially in areas with little public transportation.

When Ralphs opened its 10,000-square-foot self-service store in West Hollywood, it was the company’s largest. It had a large parking lot for the shoppers’ vehicles.

Inside, the high-ceilinged, spacious store didn’t seem like a typical grocery store. One columnist compared it to a “marketplace of Rome, where Phoenicians came to peddle their bright silks and bits of treasure from afar.”

“Some of these early Ralph buildings are almost as modern today as when they were built 25 and 30 years ago,” supermarket analyst M. M. Zimmerman wrote in 1955.

Taking advantage of its location, Ralphs prominently displayed its California produce. Its prices were higher than A&P’s, but its business model proved popular enough that other LA-area grocers had created 30 similar stores by the time King Kullen opened in 1930.

Many supermarket histories include New Jersey’s Big Bear, which opened in 1932. Transforming a 50,000-square-foot auto plant into a cavernous, boisterous market, Robert Otis and Roy Dawson tipped their hats to King Kullen by calling their store a “price crusher.”

Only 15,000 square feet were devoted to grocery items, mostly in cans and packages. To get there, shoppers first had to pass by meat, produce, and bakery counters.

A soda fountain, electronics, tools, cosmetics, drugs, and other departments made up the rest. Customers crowded around tables piled with merchandise. Some traveled 40 miles to take advantage of the store’s low prices.

It took Big Bear three days to rake in $31,000, one historian estimated. It might take a small chain store months to sell as much.

People began referring to Big Bear and its many imitators as “barney stores.” Some industry analysts dismissed the cheap fixtures and overwhelming layouts of these “wild animal” stores, which often had leopard, tiger, or other beasts in their names.

Other commonalities included free parking, a high volume of products, a certain amount of annual sales, and a variety of departments. By combining butcheries, bakeries, produce, and packaged goods under one roof, they offered one-stop food shopping. Sometimes these were independent contractors leasing space in a building with a big commercial footprint.

These stores also differed from earlier grocers in other ways. Customers paid in cash, and the stores often didn’t offer delivery services. The unofficial motto was “pile it high, and sell it cheap,” one supermarket owner told Zimmerman in 1955.

“What made supermarkets novel was not their low prices or self-service cash-and-carry approach, however, but the extraordinary array of goods and services they provided under one roof: fresh produce, dairy, meats, baked goods, and canned and packaged foods were to be had, but so were a stunning variety of other items and services,” Shane Hamilton wrote in “Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race.”

While some businesses, including Ralphs, incorporated attractive design into their layouts, others, like the barney stores, opted for affordability over aesthetics.

Many early supermarkets were independent. It took large chains like A&P and Kroger longer to catch on to the new business model.

A few months after Big Bear opened in New Jersey, a grocery industry analyst told The New York Times it was a novelty that would wear off.

“When that time comes, the verdict will be much the same as in Syracuse and Detroit, where ‘warehouses’ or supermarkets enjoyed a brief period of outstanding success and then experienced a decided drop in sales volume,” he said.

A&P’s president, John Hartford, also said later that his company didn’t take supermarkets seriously. Then it realized King Kullen was crushing its regional shops. By 1936, Safeway, A&P, and Kroger started opening bigger stores.

Adapting to larger, high-volume stores proved successful for these chains. They closed smaller shops to focus on more lucrative supermarkets.

Many customers were lured in by supermarkets’ promise of low prices and a large selection. Shoppers with jobs also appreciated supermarkets’ evening hours, as many chains closed at 6 p.m. Owners who had previously run smaller grocery stores saw their operating costs cut in half.

Historians cite a variety of factors, from taxes on chain stores to improved refrigeration technology to regulations on food prices, to explain why the number of supermarkets exploded in the late 1930s and ’40s.

During this era, owners started figuring out how to better manage an influx of customers at busy times. They tried out new ways of displaying merchandise to attract buyers’ attention. Placed at eye-level, the products would sell themselves.

“Silent salesmanship prevailed in the subtlety of aisle displays that halted the progress of shoppers, at which point they might observe other shoppers and be influenced by their purchases,” historian Lisa C. Tolbert wrote in “Beyond Piggly Wiggly: Inventing the American Self-Service Store.”

Navigating these spacious supermarkets packed with goods also prompted the spread of the shopping cart in the late 1930s.

While some businesses had bargain prices that brought in a variety of shoppers, some chains that were closing stores in low-income neighborhoods opened their new supermarkets in wealthy areas, Deutsch wrote. They worried that cheap products weren’t enough to bring in the middle-class women they wanted as customers.

To distinguish themselves from barney stores, some supermarkets invested more in decor and offered perks like employees who carried groceries to shoppers’ cars.

“Upscale supermarkets were welcomed into postwar suburban housing developments in and around Chicago and quickly began emphasizing the quality and convenience of goods they sold, continuing to move away from an emphasis on price,” Deutsch wrote in a 1999 journal article.

Similarly, in Southern California, business owners strategically placed their supermarkets and mostly had all-white clientele.

“In part, this was because a new supermarket had the potential to transform the demographics and economic life of an area, but it was also because operators carefully built stores adjacent to the most desirable clientele,” Davison wrote.

More types of prepackaged foods, the advent of frozen food, improved freezer technology, and other changes began impacting Americans’ diets as supermarkets continued to grow.

Farming methods were becoming more industrialized, and A&P and other sellers used new advances to their advantage to tap into a network of producers to find the most appealing potatoes, peaches, and peas from around the country. Customers in northern states got used to having certain fresh fruits and vegetables year-round instead of just seasonally.

While they didn’t have complete control of the supply chain, stores like A&P bought produce in large quantities, and “farmers who did not comply with the firm’s demands for high-volume, standardized production were sure to be left outside the marketplace,” Hamilton wrote.

While some contemporary analysts had predicted that supermarkets would die out after the Depression ended, there were more stores than ever in the years following World War II. Many were stocking six times as many items as the earliest supermarkets.

Most adopted the more sedate design of chains like A&P. “The older chaotic supermarkets were quickly replaced by the ordered, and overtly-feminized, space of the postwar super-market,” Deutsch wrote.

Many of these chains have since melded together or completely disappeared. Yet in just a few decades, they completely changed the way many Americans shopped for groceries, and we’re still feeling those influences today.

Sources: “Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race” by Shane Hamilton; “Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century” by Tracey Deutsch; “Beyond Piggly Wiggly: Inventing the American Self-Service Store” by Lisa C. Tolbert; “Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping” by Rachel Bowlby; “The American Grocery Store: The Business Evolution of an Architectural Space” by James M. Mayo; “The Super Market: A Revolution in Distribution” by M. M. Zimmerman; “From ‘Wild Animal Stores’ to Women’s Sphere: Supermarkets and the Politics of Mass Consumption, 1930-1950” by Tracey Deutsch; “Super City: Los Angeles and the Birth of the Supermarket, 1914—1941” by Benjamin Davison; “The Rise of the Supermarket” by Tevere Macfadyen; International Directory of Company Histories; and Smithsonian Magazine.