Supermarkets

Supermarkets can be broadly defined as self-service grocery stores offering a range of food and household goods that are organized and displayed according to product category. While supermarkets differ widely in floor size and product selection, they are historically differentiated from “traditional” counter-service grocery stores. They are differentiated also from the more recently developed retail forms of hypermarkets and superstores. Whereas retail theory works with specific definitions of supermarkets, hypermarkets, and superstores based largely on shop size and stock, there is in practice a continuum between these retail forms, and in everyday discourse supermarket remains the generic term.

Although now the dominant form of grocery and household goods retailing in Western and other affluent nations (and increasingly evident in developing economies), supermarkets are a relatively recent phenomenon when compared with other shopping environments such as arcades and department stores. The origin of the supermarket is generally traced to the 1930s, and its status as a retail innovation lay in its contrast to the counter-service grocery store. The grocery store has been seen as a product of the so-called retail revolution of the nineteenth century—particularly in Britain—which was characterized by the consolidation of the retail shop as the site of consumption at the expense of markets, itinerant traders, and specialist producer-retailers (Jefferys 1954). Although the emergence of the counter-service grocery store was in fact a gradual rather than a revolutionary process, its presence was certainly bolstered in the mid- to late-nineteenth century by the rapid development of manufactured and nationally distributed products; by the packaging, branding, and price-marking of goods; and by the rise of retail chains that operated or franchised large numbers of stores under one company banner. This substantially reshaped grocery retailing, and the interaction between customer and a professional grocer remained a key element of everyday shopping in countries such Britain, Canada, Australia, and, to a much lesser extent, the United States until the mid-twentieth century.

The rise of self-service in the grocery sector, once again a gradual rather than revolutionary process, fundamentally challenged this ethos of interaction across a counter and was enabled not only by further developments in manufacturing, processing, and packaging, but by population growth and urban expansion, and by technological developments in refrigeration, communications, and especially automobile transport. Equally, self-service expressed perfectly a consolidating Western ideology of consumer choice, individualism, and freedom.

The major, if not globally decisive, blow to counter-service was represented by the rise of the proto-supermarket in the United States. These supermarkets were initially established by independent retailers to challenge the dominance of grocery chains. Building on the concept of self-service grocery stores (originally franchised in the United States in the 1920s under the name of Piggly Wiggly), the King Kullen stores, operating from 1930 on, represented the first such challenge. Set up in old factories and warehouses on the emerging suburban outskirts of New York, King Kullen stores were filled with nationally branded and packaged products, offered no delivery or customer credit, traded on the concepts of cheapness and abundance, and courted the emerging car-using consumer (Tedlow 1990).

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