Carried Away by Rachel Bowlby

Author:Rachel Bowlby
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: SOC000000, Social Science/General, Social Science/Feminism & Feminist Theory, SOC010000
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2001-03-14T22:00:00+00:00

Piggly Wiggly

There was also Piggly Wiggly, that first fantastical shopping invention of the redoubtable Clarence Saunders, born in Virginia in 1881. When the first Piggly Wiggly store opened in Memphis in 1916, roses were presented to all women with red hair. Piggly Wiggly had a self-service system whereby the shopper ‘wiggled’ round, up and down the short, narrow aisles; it sold only prepackaged goods that were ‘pre-sold’ by advertising. The customer, it was supposed, went in knowing what she wanted and was able to recognize it from the package; no clerk need intervene to make a suggestion or find an article.

At first, losses from pilfering were as much as 6 per cent, so stringent security measures were introduced of a kind that were later to become the norm in post-Big Bear supermarkets. Unlike the conventional store arrangement, points of entry and exit were separated. There were turnstiles to get in and proto-checkouts in the form of separate tables for cashiers with room for only one person to pass through at a time. The effect of these changes was to reduce the rate of loss right down to 0.75 per cent. In the process was born the rigid difference between the inner aisles of a self-service store as a free space in which you can pick up whatever you like, and the point of exit as a ‘control’ where you have to pay to get out. Ironically, it’s the customer who has bought nothing that is the one who appears to be in the wrong, passing the checkout furtively with nothing to declare.

By 1923 there were over two and a half thousand Piggly Wiggly stores; but that was the end. There was a fall in share prices because lots of little Piggly Wigglies had popped up that were not owned by Saunders (this species is still flourishing). Despite attempts to fight Wall Street speculators and a campaign in Memphis to persuade people to buy shares, Saunders was ousted when he refused to show his accounts. There was also criticism locally of the vast pink mansion he was building himself in the city.

But being in the red was not something to put off a man with a penchant for pink palaces and strawberry blondes. Saunders rose again with a set of stores called ‘Clarence-Saunders-sole-owner-of-my-name’ – until he once more went bust in 1930. After that there was Keedoozle, the first ‘robotic’ store, in 1945. Customers used a ‘key’ to unlock display cases and signal the goods they wanted. These were then dispatched along an automatic conveyor to the checkout, where they were identified by the key number. When Saunders died, in 1953, he was about to try yet another experimental venture, the ‘Foodelectric’ store.

Clarence Saunders’s Piggly Wiggly stores were small, and in that sense they do not appear as anticipations of later supermarket forms. But in another respect they can be seen, in their very minimalism, as a sort of Platonic idea of the supermarket that never was to be. The whole

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