Grocery Stores: Supermarkets

The chain store system and the self-service concept shaped the supermarket. In many ways, the supermarket was an application of a business approach previously developed in the super-size department stores of John Wanamaker in Philadelphia and Marshall Field in Chicago early in the twentieth century. Department stores had discovered how retail prices could be reduced by bulk buying and how the subsequent increased volume of sales could raise the profit rate. Although the term “super market” is usually credited to William Albers, who opened the Albers Super Market in Cincinnati in November 1933, the concept and the term originated in southern California in the previous decade. In the 1920s Los Angeles was sprawling in area and highly dependent on the automobile. Land was relatively inexpensive, and two chains—Ralph’s Grocery Company and Alpha Beta Food Markets—constructed large stores that were laid out in sections according to categories of food. The major innovation of these stores was size: some of them covered five thousand square feet—ten times the size of A&P Economy Stores.