Shay Arthur | WREG
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WREG) — When you think of Memphis, many think of music — the rich sounds of blues, rock n roll, soul and hip hop, Beale Street, Elvis and Graceland.
But Memphis is also the site of a different kind of innovation. It’s the home of the first modern-day, self-service grocery store Piggly Wiggly, the first hotel chain Holiday Inn and years down the road, overnight shipping with Federal Express.
These three industries transformed how we operate to this day.
The next time you step foot inside your grocery store, you can thank Clarence Saunders and his idea, which came to fruition in 1916.
Saunders created the modern self-service grocery store, the Piggly Wiggly.
The chain is still in existence in the country today. A mock version of the original store, decked out with what would’ve been on the aisles at the time, is documented inside what’s known to many as the Pink Palace, now a museum in East Memphis. But the massive building was originally built by Saunders to be a luxury estate.
Today it shows the grocery store’s evolution. Prior to 1916, shopping was done at country stores.
“If you wanted to shop at a major store other than a, dry goods store, you had to come to Memphis,” Dowdy said.
You would tell the clerk behind a counter what goods you wanted and they would gather the different items.
Saunders, who worked in a country store, knew there was another way to do business — a way for the customer to have control, and a way he could make more money.
“One of the differences here is that it’s a kind of a forced march,” said longtime museum curator Steve Masler. “You have to go in one place and go up and down every aisle before you can leave through the checkout line.”
That, in turn, causes people to spend more money.
Customers for the first time had the opportunity to browse shelves, with wooden baskets for carrying the items offered at the front of the store.
In the new supermarket, Saunders patented the concept of turnstiles to control the flow of visitors going in and going out.
Within the walls of Piggly Wiggly, as customers browse the aisles, the concept of modern marketing actually started. The customers had a chance to pick and choose what brands, what products they wanted and those companies they wanted to stand out.
“So, today’s marketing where we see 100 cereals in the cereal aisle that are very similar, a lot of them, but they have all these different, wonderful covers of the cereal boxes, that kind of thing began with Piggly Wiggly,” Masler said.
More than 35 years later, in 1952, another Memphian created another customer experience — only this was for overnight trips.
Seeing a need after going on a family road trip, Kemmons Wilson created the first Holiday Inn Hotel, decked out with a phone and TV in every room — unheard of at the time — along with a restaurant on site.
“He very much aimed his motels at families,” Dowdy said. “He knew there were a lot of families like him who wanted to see the world. This was post-World War II, the economy is great, more people have disposable income. knew that this was the right moment to start to do this. And he also put swimming pools in hotels, in motels, which were unheard of.”