Clarence Saunders and the Founding of Piggly Wiggly by Mike Freeman

Author:Mike Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Memphians drove by the Pink Palace and wondered, “Why would he build something so big for just one family?” Saunders never finished the house. The completed Pink Palace became the city’s first museum in 1930. Courtesy of Special Collections, McWherter Library, University of Memphis.

Determined as he was to hide his feelings, his erratic behavior betrayed him. The Clarksville and Nashville friends who observed him on that weekend trip to meet Ford kept their thoughts to themselves. Many years later, he revealed that he took up to five hot baths a night while hashing out his problems. This only hints at the stress his family endured.

Still his friends worked for him, conferring with the hostile investors for a solution to the dispute. He was ready to concede something to his opposition. “This is my business,” he told them, and “I know how to run it. I am the only one who can get you out. But you must give me time and you must not tie my hands. Extend those obligations until September 1 and January 1, 1924 and I will get you out. If I don’t, then you can step in and take the business.” They accepted his compromise proposal with one stipulation: Saunders must accept Dinkins’s advisory position.

Despite the wishes of his advisors, he sold store units in Kansas City, Denver and San Antonio. All together, his transactions earned the barren treasury $2,500,000. The new cash infusion did not save Piggly Wiggly from the first business decline in its short history. Some of the companies supplying the Piggly Wiggly stores demanded “COD only.” Favorite brands began to disappear from the shelves of the stores. A sharp cut in advertising had been made, and this in turn caused business to fall off still more.

On August 10, Saunders went to the governor’s office to face Governor Peay, Luke Lea and Rogers Caldwell. Caldwell delivered the bad news: “Piggly Wiggly cannot be saved until you resign and let someone else run the company.” Some of the loyal Memphis investors proposed that Saunders temporarily resign as president of the Piggly Wiggly Stores, Inc., at the same time that the pool members would accept the collateral stock at fifty dollars a share from him instead of cash. The New Orleans pool insisted, “Saunders must go!” They would no longer compromise with him.

Saunders sensed the inevitable. Hoping to stem confusion, he sent telegrams to all Piggly Wiggly employees asking them to remain on the job regardless of what happened to him. He said to the press about his troubles with the investors, “I am not bitter about it as I realize that is the fortunes of war…Wall Street has had its revenge…I have lost my money and my business as a result of the treachery practiced upon me by the New York Stock Exchange.”

He resigned on Monday, August 13, along with Fletcher Scott from the board of directors of Piggly Wiggly Stores, Inc. John Bullington and coffee merchant Joseph Maury, another Memphis investor, replaced the departing board members.

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