The Supermarket Revolution

By the 1950s "packaging engineering" had become an American occupation.  By the late 1960s consumer products accounted for 70% of all packaging materials.  The packaging revolution all happened within one-third of a century.  Before 1920 packaged goods only included common grocery items like sugar, flour, salt, rice, tea and coffee. 

The growth of national advertising and branding produced still another American institution - the supermarket.  Defined as "a large retail market that sells food and other household goods and that operates as a self-serve, cash-and-carry basis."

Piggly Wiggly was one of the first supermarket pioneers prior to World War I.  After the second World War, the widening array of competing items and brands displayed to the customer on open shelves gave the package a whole new power.

One of the first supermarkets, San Francisco's Crystal Palace, opened in 1923, in a large steel-frame building on a 68,000 square foot site of a former baseball diamond.  They offered food, drugs, tobacco, liquor and after 1934, a jewelry store, and a barber and beauty shop.  By 1939 the store boasted one hour sales of 51,000 pounds of sugar, 5 carloads of eggs in one month, and 220 tons of lemons in one year. 

The supermarket depended on the customer's temptation to add purchases to a shopping cart...the impulse buy.  The shopping cart was an invention of a Houston employee who removed the handle from a toy wagon and fastened it to a shopping basket attached on the wagon.  By 1930 shopping carts were being manufactured and by 1950 were in hardware stores, department stores, and appliance stores. 

While the difference between one kind of shop and another was becoming blurred, stores crossed boundaries and began to sell a little bit of everything. Department stores "scrambled" their merchandising, stocking small appliances, clothing, hardware, food and cosmetics. As early as 1931, a Long Island supermarket advertised evening hours as late as 10pm for the first time.  Staying open late at night opened shopping to those who worked day jobs and got off too late to shop. 

The increasing store size, the increasing number of items, and the increasing competition for the consumer's attention - made packaging a new sophisticated and self-conscious industry, and the salesman was nowhere to be found...

Next time...Self-service packaging
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Today in Pioneer History: "On March 12, 1894, Coca-Cola was sold in glass bottles for the first time.  For the first few years of its existence, Coca-Cola was only available in a fountain drink.  Originally developed as a non-additive substitute for morphine, then marketed as a non-alcoholic 'temperance drink,' it was invented by John Pemberton a druggist in Columbus, Georgia in 1886.