D. On September 6, 1916, Saunders performed the self-service revolution in the USA by opening the
first Piggly Wiggly featured by the turnstile at the entrance store at 79 Jefferson Street in Memphis,
Tennessee. Quite distinct from those in other grocery stores, customers in Piggly Wiggly chose the goods on
the shelves and paid the items all by themselves. Inside the Piggly Wiggly, shoppers were not at the mercy
of staff. They were free to roam the store, check out the products and get what they needed by their own
hands. There, the items were clearly priced, and no one forced customers to buy the things they did not need.
As a matter of fact, the biggest benefit that the Piggly Wiggly brought to customers was the money-saving
effect. Self-service was optimistic for the improvement. ‘It is good for both the consumer and retailer
because it cuts costs,’ noted George T. Haley, a professor at the University of New Haven and director of the
Centre for International Industry Competitiveness, ‘if you look at the way in which grocery stores (previous
to Piggly Wiggly and Alpha Beta) were operated, what you can find is that there are a great number of
workers involved, and labour is a major expense.’ Fortunately, the chain stores such as Piggly Wiggly cut
the fat.
E. Piggly Wiggly and this kind of self-service stores soared at that time. In the first year, Saunders
opened nine branches in Memphis. Meanwhile, Saunders immediately applied a patent for the self-service
concept and began franchising Piggly Wiggly stores. Thanks to the employment of self-service and
franchising, the number of Piggly Wiggly had increased to nearly 1,300 by 1923. Piggly Wiggly sold $100
million (worth $1.3 billion today) in groceries, which made it the third-biggest grocery retailer in the nation.
After that, this chain store experienced company listing on the New York Stock Exchange, with the stocks