Supermarket 313

[Oliver Parkes]

A supermarket is a self-service shop offering a wide variety of food, beverages and household products, organized into sections. This kind of store is larger and has a wider selection than earlier grocery stores, but is smaller and more limited in the range of merchandise than a hypermarket or big-box market. In everyday United States usage, however, "grocery store" is often used to mean "supermarket".[1][2]

The supermarket typically has places for fresh meat, fresh produce, dairy, deli items, baked goods, and similar foodstuffs. Shelf space is also reserved for canned and packaged goods and for various non-food items such as kitchenware, household cleaners, pharmacy products and pet supplies. Some supermarkets also sell other household products that are consumed regularly, such as alcohol (where permitted), medicine, and clothing, and some sell a much wider range of non-food products: DVDs, sporting equipment, board games, and seasonal items (e.g., Christmas wrapping paper, Easter eggs, school uniforms, Valentine's Day themed gifts, Mother's Day gifts, Father's Day gifts and Halloween).

A larger full-service supermarket combined with a department store is sometimes known as a hypermarket. Other services may include those of banks, cafs, childcare centers/creches, insurance (and other financial services), mobile phone sales, photo processing, video rentals, pharmacies, and gas stations. If the eatery in a supermarket is substantial enough, the facility may be called a "grocerant", a portmanteau of "grocery" and "restaurant".[3]

The traditional supermarket occupies a large amount of floor space, usually on a single level. It is usually situated near a residential area in order to be convenient to consumers. The basic appeal is the availability of a broad selection of goods under a single roof, at relatively low prices. Other advantages include ease of parking and frequently the convenience of shopping hours that extend into the evening or even 24 hours of the day. Supermarkets usually allocate large budgets to advertising, typically through newspapers and television. They also present elaborate in-shop displays of products.

Supermarkets typically are chain stores, supplied by the distribution centers of their parent companies, thus increasing opportunities for economies of scale. Supermarkets usually offer products at relatively low prices by using their buying power to buy goods from manufacturers at lower prices than smaller stores can. They also minimize financing costs by paying for goods at least 30 days after receipt and some extract credit terms of 90 days or more from vendors. Certain products (typically staple foods such as bread, milk and sugar) are very occasionally sold as loss leaders so as to attract shoppers to their store. Supermarkets make up for their low margins by a high volume of sales, and with of higher-margin items bought by the customers. Self-service with shopping carts (trolleys) or baskets reduces labor costs, and many supermarket chains are attempting further reduction by shifting to self-service check-outs.

Historically, the earliest retailers were peddlers who marketed their wares in the streets; however, by the 1920s, retail food sales in the United States had mostly shifted to small corner grocery stores.[4] In that era, the standard retail grocery business model was for a clerk to fetch products from shelves behind the merchant's counter while customers waited in front of the counter, indicating the items they wanted.[4] Most foods and merchandise did not come in individually wrapped consumer-sized packages, so the clerk had to measure out and wrap the precise amount desired.[4] Merchants did not post prices, which forced customers to haggle and bargain with clerks to reach fair prices for their purchases.[4] This business model had already been established in Europe for several centuries. It offered extensive opportunities for social interaction: many regarded this style of shopping as "a social occasion" and would often "pause for conversations with the staff or other customers".[5]

These practices were by nature slow, had high labor intensity, and were quite expensive. The number of customers who could be attended to at one time was limited by the number of staff employed in the store. Shopping for groceries often also involved trips to multiple specialty shops, such as a greengrocer, butcher, bakery, fishmonger and dry goods store, in addition to a general store. Milk and other items of short shelf life were delivered by a milkman.

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P), which was established in 1859, was an early grocery store chain in Canada and the United States. It became common in North American cities in the 1920s. Early chains like A&P did not sell fresh meats or produce. During the 1920s, to reduce the hassle of visiting multiple stores, U.S. grocery store chains like A&P introduced the combination store.[10] This was a grocery store which combined several departments under one roof, but generally maintained the traditional system of clerks pulling products from shelves on request.[10] By 1929, only one in three U.S. grocery stores was a combination store.[10]

The concept of a self-service grocery store predates the supermarket; it was developed by entrepreneur Clarence Saunders at his Piggly Wiggly stores, the first of which opened in 1916.[11] Saunders was awarded several patents for the ideas he incorporated into his stores.[12][13][14][15] The stores were a financial success and Saunders began to offer franchises.

The general trend since then has been to stock shelves at night so that customers, the following day, can obtain their own goods and bring them to the front of the store to pay for them. Although there is a higher risk of shoplifting, the costs of appropriate security measures ideally will be outweighed by reduced labor costs.[16][unreliable source?]

Historically, there has been much debate about the origin of the supermarket. For example, Southern California grocery store chains Alpha Beta and Ralphs both have strong claims to being the first supermarket.[17] By 1930, both chains were already operating multiple 12,000-square-foot (1,100 m2) self-service grocery stores.[17] However, as of 1930, both chains were not yet true supermarkets in the modern sense because their prices remained quite high;[17] one of the most important defining features of the supermarket is cheap food.[18] Their main selling point was free parking.[17] Other strong contenders in Texas included Weingarten's and Henke & Pillot.[19]

To end the debate, the Food Marketing Institute in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and with funding from H.J. Heinz, researched the issue. They defined the attributes of a supermarket as "self-service, separate product departments, discount pricing, marketing and volume selling".[20] They determined that the first true supermarket in the United States was opened by a former Kroger employee, Michael J. Cullen, on 4 August 1930, inside a 6,000-square-foot (560 m2) former garage in Jamaica, Queens in New York City.[20][21] The store King Kullen, operated under the logic of "pile it high and sell it cheap".[18] The layout was designed by Joseph Unger, who originated the concept of customers using baskets to collect groceries before checking out at a counter.[22] Everything displayed for sale in the store "had prices clearly marked", meaning that consumers would no longer need to haggle over prices.[18] Cullen described his store as "the world's greatest price wrecker".[18][23] At the time of his death in 1936, there were seventeen King Kullen stores in operation. Although Saunders had brought the world self-service, uniform stores, and nationwide marketing, Cullen built on this idea by adding separate food departments, selling large volumes of food at discount prices and adding a parking lot.[20]

Early supermarkets like King Kullen were called "cheapy markets" by industry experts at the time; this was soon replaced by the phrase "super market".[18] The compound phrase was then closed up to become the modern term "supermarket".[11]

Other established American grocery chains in the 1930s, such as Kroger and Safeway Inc. at first resisted Cullen's idea, but were eventually forced to build their own supermarkets as the economy sank into the Great Depression. American consumers became extraordinarily price-sensitive at a level never experienced before.[20] Kroger took the idea one step further and pioneered the first supermarket surrounded on all four sides by a parking lot.[20] Once the large chains joined the supermarket trend, the new retail format became widespread. The number of American supermarkets almost tripled from 1,200 in 32 states in 1936 to over 3,000 in 47 states in 1937.[18] It was well over 15,000 by 1950.[24] One sign of the supermarket format's success in slashing labor costs, overhead, and food prices was that the percentage of disposable income spent by American consumers on food plunged "from 21 percent in 1930 to 16 percent in 1940".[18] The modern era of "cheap food" had begun.[18]

As large chain stores began to dominate the American grocery landscape with their low overhead and low prices (while crushing numerous independent small stores along the way), a backlash to this radical alteration of food distribution infrastructure appeared in the form of numerous anti-chain campaigns. The idea of "monopsony", proposed by Cambridge economist Joan Robinson in 1933, that a single buyer could outmaneuver a market of multiple sellers, became a strong anti-chain rhetorical device. With public backlash came political pressure to even the playing field for smaller vendors lacking the luxury of economies of scale. In 1936, the Robinson-Patman Act was implemented as a way of preventing such large chains from using their buying power to reap advantages over small stores, although the act was not well enforced and did not have much impact on such chains.[25]

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