Grocers were once wholesale spice dealers, and groceries were bars
The word grocer comes from an old French term for wholesaler, because medieval grocers sold spices, sugar and later tea and coffee in bulk. For roughly two centuries afterwards, a grocery was somewhere you went for a drink. Self-service shopping only arrived in 1916, with a Memphis store called Piggly Wiggly.
From as early as the 14th century, a grocer dealt in dry goods such as spices, pepper and sugar, later adding cocoa, chocolate, tea and coffee. Because these were bought in bulk, the trade took its name from the French grossier, rooted in the Medieval Latin grossarius, the same source that gives us gross as a measure of 144. Between the late 1600s and the 1850s, a grocery meant a drinking place. Only as canned and packaged staples spread did grocers broaden into dairy, meat and fresh produce.
The big shift in how people shop came when Clarence Saunders opened Piggly Wiggly in 1916. Before it, customers asked a clerk to fetch items from behind a counter; letting shoppers help themselves meant far fewer staff were needed. Early supermarkets then grew out of chains of grocer's shops. Smaller stores responded by carving out niches in premium, unusual or ethnic foods, or by staying close to where people live. Rural general stores traditionally sold on trust-based credit, letting farm families buy staples until harvest money came in.
Words differ across the Atlantic. In everyday American speech a grocery store simply means a supermarket, though US and Canadian officials use a wider definition that excludes convenience stores. In Britain the phrase is barely used; people say supermarket, corner shop or grocer's, and the government sorts shops purely by floor area, calling anything under 280 square metres a convenience store.
Europe's dense cities often cannot fit American-style supermarkets, but compact metro stores and out-of-town hypermarkets have still squeezed independent shops. Elsewhere the small shop dominates: 90% of sales in India's 810-billion-dollar food and grocery market go through some 12 million neighbourhood stores called kirana.
Source: Grocery store
