Supermarket
A supermarket is a self-service shop offering a wide variety of food, beverages and household products, organized into sections under one roof. The supermarket retail format first appeared around 1930 in the United States as the culmination of almost two decades of retail innovations to the grocery store, and began to spread to other countries after extensive worldwide publicity in 1956. In everyday American English usage, "grocery store" is often used interchangeably with "supermarket", while in other regions a supermarket is larger and has a wider selection, but is smaller and more limited in the range of merchandise than a hypermarket or megastore, which developed decades later.
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, medicine, and clothing, and some sell a much wider range of non-food products: DVDs, art supplies, sporting equipment, board games, and seasonal items.
A larger full-service supermarket combined with a department store is sometimes known as a hypermarket. Other services may include those of banks, cafés, childcare centers/creches, insurance, mobile phone sales, photo processing, video rentals, pharmacies, and filling stations. In the US, if the eatery in a supermarket is substantial enough, the facility may be called a "grocerant", a portmanteau of "grocery" and "restaurant".
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 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 sales of higher-margin items bought by the customers. Self-service with shopping carts or baskets reduces labor costs, and many supermarket chains are attempting further reduction by shifting to self-service check-outs.
History
Early history of retail food sales
Historically, the earliest retailers were peddlers who marketed their wares in the streets, but by the 1920s, retail food sales in the United States had mostly shifted to small corner grocery stores. 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. Customers needed to ask because "most stores were designed to keep customers away from the food". 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. Merchants did not post prices, which forced customers to haggle and bargain with clerks to reach fair prices for their purchases. Haggling was further complicated by other factors such as the clerk's awareness of the customer's social status and ability to pay. This business model had already been established in Europe for millennia, with examples of primitive retail stores found as far back as ancient Rome. 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".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. Early grocery stores were "austere" and tiny by modern standards, with as few as 450 items. Shopping for groceries often 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. These small retailers were the final links in a "long and tortuous food chain," as most of them were far too small to deal directly with most of the persons who actually harvested, processed, and distributed all that food. During the 1920s, the highly inefficient nature of the American food distribution system meant that the "average urban family spent fully one-third of its budget on food".
One of the most important defining features of the modern supermarket is cheap food. The vast abundance of cheap, wholesome food which modern consumers take for granted today was simply unimaginable before the middle of the 20th century, to the point that the first American supermarket customers in the 1930s were overcome with emotion at the sight of so much cheap food.
Before the 20th century, food was neither cheap, nor wholesome, nor abundant. For example, in 1812, almost 90 percent of Americans worked in food production, and they struggled to stay alive on food which was often scarce, of poor quality, and riddled with diseases which could and did often kill them.
Early experiments in building large stores and chain stores
The concept of an inexpensive food market relying on economies of scale was developed by Vincent Astor, but he was ahead of his time. He founded the Astor Market in 1915, investing $750,000 of his fortune into a 165′ by 125′ corner of 95th and Broadway, Manhattan, creating, in effect, an open-air mini-mall that sold meat, fruit, produce and flowers. The expectation was that customers would come from great distances, but in the end, even attracting people from ten blocks away was difficult, and the market folded in 1917.The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, 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 such as 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 such as A&P introduced the combination store. 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. By 1929, only one in three U.S. grocery stores was a combination store.
Self-service grocery stores
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. Saunders was awarded several patents for the ideas he incorporated into his stores. 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.
Birth of the supermarket
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. By 1930, both chains were already operating multiple self-service grocery stores. However, as of 1930, both chains were not yet true supermarkets in the modern sense because their prices remained quite high; as noted above, one of the most important defining features of the supermarket is cheap food. Their main selling point was free parking. Other strong contenders in Texas included Weingarten's and Henke & Pillot.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". 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 former garage in Jamaica, Queens in New York City. The store King Kullen, operated under the logic of "pile it high and sell it cheap". The store layout was designed by Joseph Unger, who originated the concept of customers using baskets to collect groceries before checking out at a counter. Everything displayed for sale in the store "had prices clearly marked", meaning that consumers would no longer need to haggle over prices. Cullen described his store as "the world's greatest price wrecker". 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. Moreover, the supermarket format as pioneered by King Kullen was not only cheap, but convenient, in how it combined so many different departments under one roof which had formerly required trips to separate stores.
Early supermarkets like King Kullen were called "cheapy markets" by industry experts at the time because they were literally so cheap, thanks to their rock-bottom prices; this was soon replaced by the less derogatory and more positive phrase "super market". The compound phrase was then closed up to become the modern term "supermarket".