The first true supermarket opened in a converted garage in Queens in 1930
Before supermarkets, you stood at a counter, pointed, and haggled with a clerk who fetched and weighed each item. Then in August 1930 Michael J. Cullen, a former Kroger man, opened King Kullen in an old garage in Jamaica, Queens, with marked prices, baskets and a promise to pile it high and sell cheap.
In the 1920s most American food was bought at small corner shops where the goods sat behind the counter, out of customers' reach. Nothing came in consumer-sized packets, so the clerk measured and wrapped every order, and without posted prices the final cost depended on bargaining and on how well-off the clerk thought you were. Stores might stock as few as 450 items, milk arrived by milkman, and a full shop meant visits to the butcher, baker and greengrocer. The system was so inefficient that an average urban family spent a third of its budget on food.
Several experiments came first. Vincent Astor sank 750,000 dollars into an open-air market on Broadway in 1915, hoping shoppers would travel for miles, but it struggled to draw people from ten blocks away and closed in 1917. Clarence Saunders opened the first self-service Piggly Wiggly in 1916 and patented his ideas. In California, Alpha Beta and Ralphs ran big self-service stores by 1930, yet their prices stayed high.
To settle who came first, the Food Marketing Institute worked with the Smithsonian, funded by H.J. Heinz. Their test was self-service, separate departments, discount prices, marketing and high volume, and King Kullen, opened on 4 August 1930, was the first to meet it. Joseph Unger's layout introduced shopping baskets and a checkout counter, and Cullen called himself the world's greatest price wrecker. Seventeen branches were open when he died in 1936. Industry insiders first sneered at such cheapy markets before the kinder label super market took over.
The Great Depression made shoppers intensely price-conscious, forcing reluctant chains such as Kroger and Safeway to copy the model; Kroger went further with a store ringed by parking on all four sides. The economics still hold: chains buy in bulk, pay suppliers 30 days or more after delivery, sometimes sell bread or milk at a loss to lure customers, and make money on volume.
Source: Supermarket
