at the bookstore

Sort of.

Or maybe it’s definitely an idea ahead of its time. Maybe technology is finally catching up with the concept. Again, sort of.

I found this article several weeks ago but didn’t feel like doing anything with it. To be honest I wasn’t even sure I was going to use it on the site. Then I actually reading the whole thing. I was amazed. Seriously amazed.

Keedoozle…. It sounds like the name of an Internet startup. The idea was intended to “disrupt” an entire industry, changing the way Americans do their shopping. But, like many a failed startup, Keedoozle was too far ahead of its time. Keedoozle was the first automated grocery store, founded by Clarence Saunders in 1937. Self-checkout may feel “like a product of the disconnected Internet age,” writes Laura Bliss at City Lab, but “the concept is nearly 80 years old.” Sort of. Keedoozle wasn’t exactly fully automated. More like a giant grocery vending machine.

Saunders opened his automated grocery in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had first founded Piggly Wiggly, the first “self-serving store,” as he called it, twenty years prior. By the twenties, he had hundreds of stores and had radically changed the industry, inventing the basic grocery store template we know today. (He even patented the concept). Prior to Saunders’ interventions, grocery shopping involved a retinue of clerks taking customer orders, afterward everything changed. (“It shall be said by all men,” Saunders proclaimed at his first store’s opening, “that the Piggly Wigglies shall multiply and replenish the earth with more and cleaner things to eat.”)The First Automated Grocery Store Opens in 1937

Piggly Wiggly was the first… what?

Of course, I first got stuck on the part about Piggly Wiggly being the first self-serving store. And had to look that up.

Before Clarence Saunders opened his shop, anyone who needed groceries would hand their shopping list over to a clerk who would pluck the groceries off the shelves and hand shoppers a bag full of their items. Piggly Wiggly turned that model on its head. Shoppers were invited into the store, handed a shopping basket, and left to wander the aisles of the grocery store, filling their cart with whatever products caught their eye. It’s hard to imagine now, but no one had ever thought of self-service grocery shopping before. According to TIME, who dug into Piggly Wiggly for the store’s centennial, Piggly Wiggly was the original grocery store, who not only introduced grocery carts, but also “price-marked items, employees in uniform, and the supermarket franchise model.”Here’s The Story Behind Piggly Wiggly’s Funny Name

I think my brain short-circuited

Within a generation, first, this man, Saunders, revolutionized grocery shopping. Then he attempted to take it completely into the future. Maybe. I mean with what are we seeing nowadays with stores doing deliveries and pick-ups more again, maybe the past is the future.

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