Piggly Wiggly

Clarence Saunders opened the original Piggly Wiggly at 79 Jefferson Street, Memphis, Tennessee, on 6 September 1916. It was the first self-service grocery store in America and changed forever the way Americans shopped for food.

Saunders (1881–1953) was born in Virginia and left school at the age of fourteen to clerk at a general store. In those days customers told clerks what they wanted and the clerks gathered the goods from the shelves. In 1900Saunders became a traveling salesman for a wholesale grocery distributor where he observed that many small grocers were suffering because of heavy credit losses and high overhead.