Imagine stepping back over a century, to a time when grocery shopping was a slow, formal affair. No grabbing your own box of cereal or choosing your favorite canned goods – clerks did all the work, item by painstaking item. But that all changed on September 6, 1916, in Memphis, Tennessee, when hundreds gathered for the grand opening of a grocery store with a funny name: Piggly Wiggly. This wasn’t just another shop; it was the birth of the first modern American supermarket, introducing a revolutionary self-service model that would forever transform retail grocery and the daily shopping experience for millions.
Behind this groundbreaking innovation was a true American original, Clarence Saunders. Born into hardship, Saunders understood the value of efficiency and making life a little easier for everyone. His simple idea – letting customers choose their own groceries – slashed costs and boosted convenience, turning a cumbersome chore into a streamlined, empowering act. This bold step from a Memphis maverick didn’t just create a new way to buy food; it paved the way for the affordable, accessible grocery shopping we know today, weaving a hopeful thread into the tapestry of Our American Stories.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 2: I took a job at a restaurant downtown Memphis that happened to be at 79 Jefferson, and that was the first location of the Pigmywiggley store.
Speaker 3: It was an interesting fact, though. I became interested in that. My employer wanted me to do some research because he was curious as well. You know what happened in the building. It’s such.
Speaker 4: It’s important to know what Saunders did differently was, in the old days, if you went into a store to shop, you couldn’t just reach out and pick out your own grocery. You had the clerks do that for you. So you had to wait for them to—you tell the clerk what you wanted, then they would bring it to you. And Saunders thought, “Well, this is really slow; this is so inefficient.” And all this tied in with brands advertised.
Speaker 3: Before the tournament Satuy.
Speaker 4: He had all these brands we still recognized: Kellogg’s Cereal, Van Camp’s Pork and Beans. All these companies were selling their products in stores, and Saunders knew, “Well, you don’t need a clerk to tell you what cereal you like?”
Speaker 3: You like Kellogg’s Cereal? There it is; you get it yourself.
Speaker 4: The most important thing to him is, “I could sell more groceries, fewer costs; I pay fewer people.”
Speaker 3: Saunders grew up in a family that was poor.
Speaker 4: In fact, there’s one story that a neighbor bought Clarence a pair of shoes, and then, when Saunders had money later in life, he sent a check to that family for a number of years because they helped him out when he really needed it. So he knew what it was like to suffer, to live in hardship, and he carried that with him. You know, that probably motivated him as much as he sings to do something. Saunders became a traveling salesman for a wholesale company, so he would call upon grocers. And Saunders developed a reputation for being a bit brash. He would go into a store, and he would tell the store owner, “You know, you would sell more vegetables if you displayed them this way is the way you had it.” And some thought, “Well, what does this guy know?” Not everybody appreciating his advice, but it shows that he was already thinking about, you know, trying ways to do things a bit better than before. There wasn’t a man in Memphis who built a chain of stores.
Speaker 3: Mr. Bauer’s stores. They were small corner grocery stores.
Speaker 4: But every Bowers store looked exactly the same—the signs on the front and the layout of the store where the groceries were placed.
Speaker 3: So each Bower store was identical. And that was an innovation, too.
Speaker 4: If you went from one store to the other, you knew exactly where to find what you wanted to buy because everything was in the same place, despite, you know, different locations. And Saunders, uh, absorbed these ideas. That’s the principle of a chain store. Everything is alike, as much as it’s convenient. So if you’re comfortable with what they do, then you’ll shop at a chain store, no matter where that location was. So you could go into a town where you’re unfamiliar, and find your favorite grocery—you know, whatever the business is, or Starbucks, for that matter—and get exactly what you want. And that’s the whole principle. Chase or Bowers did that before. Saunders so clearly learned from Bowers how to manage a chain store business.
Speaker 3: The one thing that Bowers did not do was.
Speaker 4: He arranged things for customers to take out themselves, so you still had clerks. And Saunders thought this was an inefficient way of doing things, and he was kind of sarcastic. He says, “You know, when a store is not very busy, the poor customer can’t get the attention of a clerk because they’re busy, goofed off in the back room.” He said that that happens, or they’re so busy—like during Christmas season, you know, everyone’s shopping in the store—so busy they can’t handle the orders properly. The arrangement of the store the Bowers and the older merchants had was this: as you walked up to a counter, and once you had your clerk’s attention, you would rattle off what you wanted, and then he would go about the rest of the store, picking out the items you wanted and bring them to the front, and then you would transact business. Then off you go. And Saunders thought, “Well, you know, they don’t need a clerk to tell them that Campbell’s soup is good. Or, you just put it on a shelf; they can find it themselves.”
Speaker 3: He took this.
Speaker 4: Journey to Terre Haute, Indiana, to look at a store that he was told was unique and designed differently, and he came back a bit disappointed.
Speaker 3: It wasn’t really anything special at all.
Speaker 4: And Saunders told the story often. He said, on the way back, he saw this mother pig at a farm, and he saw all these piglets trying to feed off the mother pig. And it reminded him of customers trying to attract the attention of a clerk. And then the idea popped into his head. He had the name Piggley Wiggily just from seeing this pig.
Speaker 3: Okay, that’s the name.
Speaker 4: And then he went about designing, “Well, how would we get to actually do this?” We’d have to practically rebuild the interior of a store to change itself.
Speaker 3: So, Tigley Wiggley, you know, that was his name, and, uh, it was a very unusual name.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think it was perfect for what he was trying to do because he was being different.
Speaker 3: And then he would—he.
Speaker 4: Began writing advertisements where Pigley Wiggily became a character.
Speaker 3: Tickley Wiggley goes to town. You know, Tigley Wiggley does this.
Speaker 4: Uh, and so, you know, that’s how he built his brand identity. He made a story out of an imaginary pig that went shopping. I read part of one: “Tigley Wiggily. Ain’t that a funny name? A fellow that got up that name must have a screw loose somewhere. All this may be so, but Pigley Wiggily knows its own business best, and his business will be this: to have no store clerks gab and smirk while folks are standing around ten deep, waiting. Dog!”
Speaker 3: Every customer will be her own clerk.
Speaker 4: So if she wants to talk to a kid about tomatoes and kill her time, all right. And, well, it seems likely this would be a mighty lonesome chat. Saunders addressed customer fears. You know, it used to be, if you went into certain stores in the old days, and, you know, the clerk might put his thumb on the scale, so you’d pay extra for tomatoes or potatoes or whatever; or they’d sell you food that was out of date. And Saunders thought all that was just, just raw. It was just not good business, and you could sell more groceries just by being honest.
Speaker 3: He was very proud of.
Speaker 4: He talked a lot about labeling prices on everything. So if you walk in, you go to the canned soup aisle, you know exactly what the price of that soup is. And it didn’t matter what store you were in—one of his stores—they were all about the same, and it didn’t matter who you were or whether the clerk knew you or not, you got the same price.
Speaker 1: When we come back, more of Mike Freeman telling the story of Clarence Saunders, the founder of Pigley Wiggly. Here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and with author Mike Freeman telling the story of Pigley Wiggly and its founder, Clarence Saunders. Let’s continue with Mike.
Speaker 4: He knew he was taking less profit. He probably had people in the grocery business say, “It couldn’t make any money.” You’re not selling; you’re not making enough profit. But he was looking for volume. Yeah. And you can open… The more stores you open, the more volume you have. You know, one of the benefits of self-service is you are selling more goods per day, and that helps eliminate the problem of spoiled food or expired food. And Saunders was aware of that, and he would advertise to people, saying, “This is what I’m doing.”
Speaker 3: I’m going to treat you fairly.
Speaker 4: I mean, now, you can’t imagine going in the store not having a label on it: “This is 32 cents” or whatever.
Speaker 3: Can’t imagine it.
Speaker 4: But before, you know, in the 20th century, that was commonplace. And once you label everything, then no grocery store can hide. His competitors were thinking, “Oh, oh, you know, we’d have to do something different!” You know, he proved right there with that first year that he had about eight or nine stores in Memphis, and Bowers had over 40, and he outsold Bowers’ stores simply because he made it easier for people to shop, and they just started swarming into this Piggy Wiggless. You know, he’s one of those rare individuals that has an idea that worked and that transformed part of our society.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 3: I don’t say he’s as great as Henry Ford, but, you know, Ford…
Speaker 4: Decided, “Well, why can’t we put an engine in this little carriage and then hook it up to some wheels, and then we don’t need a horse and buggy?” And then, well…
Speaker 3: We have a car changed the world.
Speaker 4: Saunders isn’t of that level of success, but I think he had the same mind where he thought, “Well, let’s do something a little different here.” You know, the old ways are… yeah, we can do a little faster, a little bit better than that. And then that’s what Pigleg was: the grocery store’s version of the Model T.
Speaker 3: That’s interesting is that next year he started franchising, and he actually filed for several patents—several patents—but he started selling the idea that, “Well, uh, you guys down in Arkansas—and this is in Memphis—you can build a thing.” It would, you know, there are towns all over the South that were large enough to support a couple of grocery stores.
Speaker 4: And then that proceeded very rapidly, selling franchises all over the place. You could argue that the founder of Walmart did virtually the same thing. He put a Walmart in medium-sized towns. You know, if a town doesn’t have a Walmart, it’s kind of not a town. But having a store like that in your community, hiring the local folks to work in the store—probably to manage the store—it built a loyalty for that brand; for Walmart, it still exists. It differs with Walton and Saunders, as Walton never lost his vision. He held on to him, where I think Saunders had a lot of the same attitudes, same personality. In some ways, he wanted to be that champion, but in the end, he didn’t keep that business long enough. Right now, most people don’t know Saunders. Saunders achieved a level of celebrity and wealth that most people only dream of. He’s most famous for. The Pig Palace is a building. I don’t know how many square feet—well, they’ve added on to it—but a majority of that 36,000 square feet is what he built. It was to have a swimming pool and everything a rich person would want. Saunders tried to outsmart traders on Wall Street, and to explain it simply, he didn’t realize they wrote the rules of trade. There was no governing agency overseeing financial trading that we have now. It was whatever certain people—what we call Wall Street—decided to do that was done. They made the rules among themselves. I have trouble sometimes describing a short sell as just a stock maneuver where different people in the financial business spread rumors that companies are in trouble, that stocks are not worth what they’re listing at now. And Saunders thought that was horrible. I think Piggy Wiggly had overexpanded, and there was a franchisor or two that had gone bankrupt, and that was all the trigger that these short sellers needed. And he started this campaign: “Take the shares out of the hands of these Wall—”
Speaker 3: “—Street thieves or wolves!”
Speaker 4: And he started a buying campaign in Memphis: “You know, save Piggy Wiggily from Memphis!” Most people in Memphis, or, you know, any city outside of New York, probably thought about Wall Street the same way. And it was sort of this kind of a villainous place, and he was playing on that: “You know, don’t let these thieves take our fingerly Wiggley away from us!” So everyone invested in Saunders’ scheme to buy all the shares, hold them… Well, he pushed these traders into a paddock because whatever they—
Speaker 3: —borrow, they have to pay. And if he’s—
Speaker 4: —buying all the shares, they have to come to him. They repay what they owe him. I mean, he was trying to trap them. And the Board of Directors of the Stock Exchange in New York kept Saunders from doing that.
Speaker 3: They let the traders off the hook. They could change the rules.
Speaker 4: See, there’s no government agency overseeing stock trading.
Speaker 3: Whatever.
Speaker 4: The Board of Directors thought was legal or illegal, especially if they had friends—
Speaker 3: —who got caught up in the scheme, begging, you know, “Don’t let us die out of here!” That’s, “Well, well, let Saunders die!”
Speaker 4: You know, they don’t know him, they don’t care about him. He’s not part of their social milieu or anything like that at all. He’s just some hillbilly from Tennessee who thought he knew what he was doing. They just, you know, interpreted rules to let him die. So he had borrowed all that money. Instead of gaining what he thought would be hundreds of millions of dollars, he had nothing. You know, $12… That has a lot of money today. To imagine what it was like in 1923. What Saunders had done—and there were people that really liked him because he was, you know, becoming very famous—was that he had begged Memphians to pull together money to pay off this debt. Somehow things can get back to normal operating under his leadership.
Speaker 3: And people did. They had rallies to “Save Pigmy Wingley from Memphis!” That was a campaign not for Saunders. He was careful to say, “Save Pingley Wingley from Memphis!” And he had a point there, too.
Speaker 4: I mean, and, you know, there were a lot of jobs in Memphis at stake because of this store, this business. And then he made the dumb mistake of putting money into this—what we now know as a “Pig Palace”—which was an extravagant home.
Speaker 3: I say, “You know, they—and people that invested in Piguway—must have been shocked. What on earth are they doing?”
Speaker 4: “We’re taking time away from our business, spending our money to bail you out, and you’re building this stupid house!”
Speaker 3: You don’t have time for that anymore! How did they find out about it?
Speaker 4: Well, a workman had been injured, and the newspaper published a story. Yeah, “Holy cow!” You know, they couldn’t believe it. This is a terrible mistake. He made then, costing… Well, I mean, he tried to make money, and he did, but I mean, he’s still famous for what Piggly Wiggly is, and he lost the ownership of the company in six years. I guess the story is, remarkable in itself, was that he started with one store.
Speaker 3: But, I mean, he was successful.
Speaker 4: He did build something that was… and he just didn’t hold on to it. I mean, he would be Sam Walton today, or his memory would be as big as Sam Walton if he had just held onto Pigmy Wiggley.
Speaker 3: Like Walton held on to Walmart.
Speaker 4: The most fitting memorial to him is the ordinary self-service store. Sam Walton founded Walmart in 1962. By the end of his life in 1992, Walton owned the largest retail merchandising company in the world. In his autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America, he credited the enormous success of his retail stores to the principle of self-service. His brief description of the benefits that self-service gave to him and his desire to pass on the savings to his customers seemed to be a near match to Saunders’ own words two generations before. During the past 25 years, supermarkets and large merchandise stores have become popular in nearly every country in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa. In an odd way, Clarence Saunders’ prophetic slogan for Pigley Wiggly—”all over the world”—has come true.
Speaker 1: And great job on the piece, as always, by Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Mike Freeman, who wrote The Book: Clarence Saunders and the Founding of Pigly Wiggly. And what a story! And that he started the idea of pricing and transparency and volume so that we could lower profits on…
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