Abstract
American customers have grown well accustomed to forgoing assistance from store staff so long as it means lower prices at checkout. One hundred years ago, asking customers to retrieve a can of soup from a shelf by themselves was an audacious proposition. Today, in some of the most technologically advanced stores, clerks are out of sight altogether: electronic sensors can calculate the cost of goods in a shoppers’ carts and automatically deduct payment as they depart. Beyond Piggly Wiggly: Inventing the American Self-Service Store, written by Lisa C. Tolbert and published by University of Georgia Press, offers a comprehensive historical accounting of how “self-service” came to be such an integral part of the American retail landscape.
Tolbert’s clearly written and evidence-laden book begins in the early 1900s, when American store owners were just beginning to release their paternalistic hold over the shopping experience. Taking the lead in overhauling the process of selling goods was Clarence Saunders, the inventor of the Piggly Wiggly franchise, whose 1917 patent application envisioned a future where the merchandise sold itself. Eventually, after a few fits and starts, customers gradually signaled their approval. At the time, few could have imagined that this trend would eventually enable the huge box stores and supercenters we frequent today.
The original self-service Piggly Wiggly could fit inside most present-day convenience stores. Customers matriculated through a turnstile to enter, after which they were corralled up and down aisles in a single direction, flanked by shelves of goods on both sides. At the end of the maze, a single clerk could tally the bill, accept payment, and permit the customer to click through the exit turnstile and depart the store.
Beyond Piggly Wiggly draws from an eclectic assortment of data. Chapters Two and Five rely heavily on patent applications from Saunders and other entrepreneurs. These technical drawings of floor space and design features depict each store as “an apparatus for the vending of merchandise” (p. 53). Chapters Three and Four offer a robust collection of photographs of store interiors and newspaper advertisements to convey the look and feel of what was being heralded as a “modern” shopping experience in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout the book, trade publications and governmental records are cited to help track the slow and steady rise of the self-service format. From them we learn how stores had to be rebuilt, how workers had to be retrained (or simply let go), and even how customers had to be taught how to fill their baskets themselves.
Chapter Six offers the most theoretically rich analysis of how and why this revolutionary retail model was particularly suited to the American Southeast at the time. The customer experience of the self-service format appealed to Black shoppers in the Jim Crow South because it enabled them to handle and inspect products like their white counterparts. Through spatial design, store owners also cut through class-based hierarchies: working-class shoppers could expect the same options and treatment as their wealthier peers. Piggly Wiggly even helped undo the previously gendered meaning of small-town stores as “male gathering spaces” (p. 217) by launching ad campaigns that framed the self-service format as ideal for women shoppers. Although these new store designs were meant to increase profits and were not motivated by altruism, the physical arrangement of self-service reduced the frequency and length of interactions between customers and staff and in doing so also decreased the opportunities for racism, classism, and sexism to rise to the surface.
Beyond Piggly Wiggly also offers a compelling test case for how technological inventions come to be adopted. By tracing customers’ contemporaneous accounts and reactions to these new stores as they opened, we come to understand the process of innovation as fundamentally social and incremental. No matter how efficient or helpful a new technology may appear on paper, it still must be adopted by its intended users. Through public advertisements and in-store signage, store managers tried to mold and modify shoppers’ behavior. When confusion or complaints arose, store owners modified and refined their designs. In the end, innovator and user arrived at a mutual agreement about which features were worth keeping and improving.
Today, as self-service retail continues to engineer human labor out of the equation, the prospect of full automation is on the distant horizon. In the meantime, some shoppers will continue to resist purely self-service and choose to wait longer (and pay more) for human service; but the big takeaway of Beyond Piggly Wiggly is that with the right design strategies, customers can be nudged and cajoled into doing more work than they ever thought possible. This is not entirely a bad thing. For some shoppers, handling the merchandise themselves is a small price to pay to be free from the casual racism, sexism, and/or classism they would experience from store staff otherwise. But this is a hollow victory, as reducing discrimination inside the store does nothing to address its prevalence in the wider culture.
The future economic implications of self-service, taken to their extreme, also deserve attention. What will happen when humans are no longer necessary to facilitate the buying and selling of goods? Will there be a day when logarithms predict the items you would have selected and send them to you before you think to order them? Adding layers of artificial intelligence to retail will surely lower prices, but at what cost? In the United States in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were roughly four million retail sales workers, three million cashiers, and another half million sales managers. Where will former employees of these jobs draw paychecks?
Although the future of work and occupations is an open question, Beyond Piggly Wiggly offers us the historical context to provide a few answers: First, we can design our way out of some but not all of our societal ills. Second, where we go from here will be a mutual agreement between innovator and end user. And third, lasting technological innovations can arise from humble origins.