Piggly Wiggly was the first ever self-service grocery store — see rare photos from 1918

Piggly Wiggly invented the modern grocery store. That’s not an overstatement — when Clarence Saunders opened the first location in Memphis, Tennessee in September 1916, he created a retail format that the world had simply never seen before: a store where customers walked the aisles themselves, selected their own goods off open shelves and paid at a checkout counter on the way out. Everything that feels ordinary about grocery shopping today traces back to that first Memphis store.

Before Piggly Wiggly, buying food meant dealing with a counter clerk. You’d hand over your list, a store employee would retrieve everything for you, and the whole transaction depended on the clerk’s time, attention and judgment. Prices were often negotiated rather than fixed, and the experience varied considerably depending on who was working.

Saunders saw that system as slow, expensive and prone to waste — both in labor and in the markup required to pay for it. His solution was to remove the clerk from the equation entirely. Customers entered through a turnstile, picked up a wicker basket, wound their way through aisles of clearly price-tagged merchandise and exited past a checkout counter. No haggling, no waiting, no persuasion.

The new format spread fast. Saunders franchised aggressively, and by 1922 there were more than 1,200 Piggly Wiggly stores operating across the country. The chain became a testing ground for retail ideas that are now standard everywhere — individual price tags on products, checkout lanes, self-service refrigerated cases and nationally branded packaged goods displayed on open shelves. Saunders even patented the self-service store design itself! His 1917 patent described a layout of controlled entry, guided aisles and a single exit checkout — a concept so novel it required legal protection.

Saunders himself had a turbulent run. He lost control of Piggly Wiggly in 1923 after a failed attempt to corner the company’s stock on Wall Street, a gambit that ended in his personal bankruptcy.

He spent his remaining years on other retail ventures, including a concept called the Keedoozle — a highly automated store where customers used keys to select items from glass cases — but none of his later ideas caught on the way Piggly Wiggly had. The chain, meanwhile, continued without him, passing through various ownership structures over the decades.

Today Piggly Wiggly operates primarily in the South and Midwest, with stores run by independent franchisees under the banner. The chain’s footprint shrank considerably over the second half of the 20th century as larger supermarket chains consolidated the grocery industry, but it never disappeared entirely. It remains the oldest self-service grocery chain in the United States — which is a reasonable claim to fame, given that it invented the category.

The majority of the photos and advertising text collected here come from 1918, just two years after the original Memphis store opened. They show the interior of that first location — the turnstiles, the wicker baskets, the open shelving stocked with nationally recognized brands, the refrigerated cases customers could open themselves.

The accompanying ad copy makes the pitch directly: come in, look at anything you like, and take as long as you want.

Welcome to the first Piggly Wiggly – Memphis, Tennessee (1918)

Piggly Wiggly says to each and all, “Come to this wonderful store where you enter through a turnstile, where you are loaned a basket for your use while in the store, where you can see to the right side as you walk along the first aisle, hundreds of food products displayed, and on the left-hand side, hundreds of other kinds displayed.”

Looking either at the right or the left hanging opposite each particular kind, size or assortment of any class of merchandise you will find a swinging price tag on which are some plain figures. These figures represent the exact price of the articles that are immediately behind and about the swinging price tag.

You can look at any or all of these articles displayed and you will find by looking that they are of standard and the most widely-known advertised brands of each particular kind or variety.

And so simple it is that you can just look and look and spend as much time looking as you please and you will not have to worry whether or not somebody else is in a hurry. All you have to decide is whether or not you are in a hurry.

The old Piggly Wiggly store interior

Showing entrance turnstile with small wicker shopping baskets, and check-out counter.

Vintage grocery store’s checkout counter with cash register

You can look and select one or more or any or all articles of merchandise so displayed if that is your desire. You can look and look and examine and compare prices and after looking and looking you can look again and take all of the time that you want to take.

After you have done all of this, you can simply keep on walking throughout the four separate aisles of a Piggly Wiggly store, which leads to one exit termination by the checking desk, and there you can pass without even saying “thank you.” You can just simply pass and nobody will say anything to you.

MORE: Ka-ching! Cash register history, plus see 20 antique machines

Interior of the first Piggly Wiggly self-service grocery store

Grocery store with two turnstiles in foreground

The produce aisle with bins of fruits & vegetables

“The fruit and vegetable stand of a Piggly Wiggly store gives you an assortment of fruits and vegetables that only the very largest market can afford to keep on display.”

ALSO SEE: 100 vintage 1960s supermarkets & old-fashioned grocery stores

Merchandise on the old grocery store shelves

Among other things, you can see sacks of granulated sugar, Hershey’s cocoa and chocolate bars.

Refrigerated goods

A double-sided refrigerator is in the center of the store out of which a customer with her own hands selects butter, cheese, oleo, breakfast bacon, lard and other food items that are required to be kept under refrigeration.

At any place in a Piggly Wiggly store that you see anything you want, you have a perfect right to take with your own hands the very thing that appeals to you and which you desire to purchase.

Open the ice box with your own hands. Open the meat box with your own hands. Open the bread box with your own hands and help yourself to fruits and vegetables with your own hands, and throughout the entire store, do those things for yourself which you can best do for yourself without argument with a clerk, without persuasion from him, without quibbling over prices, without even recommendation by him as to which article is better than another.

ALSO SEE: Inside vintage 1950s grocery stores & old-fashioned supermarkets

The first Piggly Wiggly store had shelves full of canned goods

More than one thousand different articles of merchandise are on display in a Piggly Wiggly store and you can choose from them that which you of your own mind and inclination desire to choose.

A Piggly Wiggly store is in reality a large pantry filled to overflowing to which any housewife in this city can come or to which she can send her husband, or her child, or her servant and select that which merits selection.

Scales on top of counter & paper bags underneath

A Piggly Wiggly store by reason of its sufficiency in operation, elimination of all man-waste and food-waste, can make it possible for the people of this town to avoid money-waste.

The enormous purchasing power of the Piggly Wiggly as they co-operate with each other in the various towns in which they are now operating and which now includes those towns listed below, and which will include towns all over the world as soon as equipment can be shipped to each town, brings about a saving in buying that cannot be approached by any retail organization that has ever been possible up to date for a community to receive the benefits from.

Packages in all Piggly Wiggly stores are weighed by an automatic weighing machine without a human hand touching the contents and with absolute accuracy in weight as to pounds and ounces.

Everybody in this city must know that a Piggly Wiggly store belongs to them individually and collectively. A Piggly Wiggly store is to be an institution of this city. It is to be operated by men who are to live and make their homes in this city. They are to be a part of the civic uplift of this community.

Piggly Wiggly with a carnation has come — will stay location, 820 Georgia Ave.

Nine thousand carnations Piggly Wiggly has brought to Chattanooga to give away free one by one to those who may come and see what Piggly Wiggly is

ANOTHER LOOK BACK: See vintage drugstores 100 years ago, selling lots of things you can’t (legally) buy anymore