The variety of businesses touched by the self-service revolution is ever greater. Soon, a wave of the Apple Watch on your wrist will be all it takes. At your hotel, there may be no check-in staff, let alone porters: Omena hotels, a Scandinavian hotel chain, sends its customers PIN codes which they can use to open their doors. Some airlines now expect you to weigh and tag your own luggage, and haul it on to the conveyor. At the airport you scan them, and your passport, at a machine. You print your boarding passes before setting out. You book your trip using a price-comparison app on your smartphone. The travel industry has been particularly ruthless in engineering its own staff out of its business. Following a model pioneered in America by such firms as Avon and Tupperware, Unilever and other consumer-goods giants are seeking to convert some of their emerging-market customers into freelance salesfolk, who peddle their products to friends and neighbours. Banks are making it ever easier to do transactions online, while cutting their branches. Waitrose, a British grocery chain, offers customers a modern-day version of Saunders’s shopping brain, to scan and tot up their purchases. CVS, an American pharmacy chain, has replaced cashiers with self-service pay-points. The self-service revolution rolls on to this day. But as an idea it has conquered the world. As a business Piggly Wiggly is now a shadow of its former self: it has only about 600 stores in 17 American states. This included working on a “shopping brain”, which shoppers would use to keep a tally of their bills. Saunders had lost control of the company in the 1920s but he kept innovating, seeking to perfect the fully automated shop. Saunders proclaimed that by cutting labour costs his idea would “slay the demon of high prices”.Īt its height, in 1932, the Piggly Wiggly empire had 2,660 stores.

Customers selected their own groceries from the shelves, and took their baskets to a cashier on the way out. Saunders came up with the idea of self-service. Hitherto, shops had kept all their goods behind the counter: customers told the staff what they wanted, waited while their purchases were bagged up, then handed over their money. IN 1916 Clarence Saunders changed the face of retailing when he opened his first Piggly Wiggly supermarket in Memphis, Tennessee.

The piggly wiggly