QUESTION-TYPE BASED TESTS FunEnglishwithme +99894 6333230
TEST 4 – The Innovation of Grocery Stores A. At the very beginning of the 20th century, the American grocery stores offered comprehensive
services: the customers would ask help from the people behind the counters (called clerks) for the items they
liked, and then the clerks would wrap the items up. For the purpose of saving time, customers had to ask
delivery boys or go in person to send the lists of what they intended to buy to the stores in advance and then
went to pay for the goods later. Generally speaking, these grocery stores sold only one brand for each item.
Such early chain stores as A&P stores, although containing full services, were very time-consuming and
inefficient for the purchase.
B. Born in Virginia, Clarence Saunders left school at the age of 14 in 1895 to work first as a clerk in a
grocery store. During his working in the store, he found that it was very inefficient for people to buy things
there. Without the assistance of computers at that time, shopping was performed in a quite backward way.
Having noticed that this inconvenient shopping mode could lead to tremendous consumption of time and
money, Saunders, with great enthusiasm and innovation, proposed an unprecedented solution let the
consumers do self-service in the process of shopping—which might bring a thorough revolution to the
whole industry.
C. In 1902, Saunders moved to Memphis to put his perspective into practice, that is, to establish a
grocery wholesale cooperative. In his newly designed grocery store, he divided the store into three different
areas: ‘A front lobby’ served as an entrance, an exit, as well as the checkouts at the front. ‘A sales
department’ was deliberately designed to allow customers to wander around the aisle and select their needed
groceries. In this way, the clerks would not do the unnecessary work but arrange more delicate aisle and
shelves to display the goods and enable the customers to browse through all the items. In the gallery above
the sales department, supervisors can monitor the customers without disturbing them. ‘Stockroom’, where
large fridges were placed to maintain fresh products, is another section of his grocery store only for the
staff to enter. Also, this new shopping design and layout could accommodate more customers to go shopping
simultaneously and even lead to some unimaginable phenomena: impulse buying and later supermarket.
