The Piggly Wiggly on This Day in History

 

This Day In History: The first Piggly Wiggly grocery store opened on this day in 1916 in Tennessee. Piggly Wiggly was the first true self-service grocery store. Before PW, grocery stores did not allow their customers to gather their own goods. Instead, a customer would give a list of items to a clerk, who would then go through the store, gathering the requested items. This was an expensive process, so Piggly Wiggly introduced the innovation of allowing customers to go through the store, gathering their own goods, thus cutting costs and lowering prices.

For those of you that won't use the self-checkout because you believe that you are depriving someone of a job, you are already doing that by collecting your own groceries.

Piggly Wiggly was the first to:

provide checkout stands.

price mark every item in the store.

provide shopping carts for customers, starting in 1937 in Oklahoma.

According to the Piggly Wiggly Web site, founder Clarence Saunders was "reluctant" to explain the origin of the company's name. There are two theories: One story says that, while riding a train, he looked out his window and saw several little pigs struggling to get under a fence, which prompted him to think of the rhyme. Someone once asked him why he had chosen such an unusual name for his organization, to which he replied, "So people will ask that very question."

There were Piggly Wiggly's in Canada as well, but in 1935 they were sold to Canada Safeway, which merged with Sobey's in 2013.

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