LETTER: Supermarket industry leaps forward to the past

Clarence Saunders opened his first Piggly Wiggly supermarket in Memphis, Tennessee, just over 100 years ago, kick-starting such innovations as checkout counters, shopping trolleys, packaging, brand recognition, and anticlockwise movement through a maze of aisles, which revolutionised the retail industry.

Built for convenience, with everything under one roof, the modern supermarket thrived  in the US during the post war boom. In SA, Checkers, then run by Raymond Ackerman, introduced the same concept, and he then started Pick n Pay in 1967. 

The growth of supermarkets and hypermarkets was  facilitated by encouraging a “weekly shop”, where suburbanites could buy  their food and groceries, pack them into their newly affordable cars and store perishable items domestically in fridge-freezers. Packaging played a critical role, primarily to sell the item by brand definition and then to prevent contamination and damage during handling. Single use plastics were excellent at achieving this. 

The supermarket industry has weathered recessions, inflation and petrol price shocks in the past, but now  faces net zero, the approaching demise of the internal combustion engine and the anti-plastics lobby. Can it survive?

It is ironic that early plastics, the first truly man-made material, were considered environmentally friendly. There was a billiards craze and making the balls from plastics prevented the extermination of elephants. However, single use plastic packaging will be replaced with deposit-attracting reusable containers, which will be sized for efficient transport rather than branding.  

Covid-19 has sent SA shoppers online. Basic food and groceries will be delivered to the front door in electric vehicles. Distribution centres will supersede supermarkets, which in as far as they remain will become product exhibition spaces, specialty and convenience stores to allow for individual preferences, exotic culinary habits and “topping up” between online deliveries.

This revolution has already begun. What amazes is how many of the emerging developments are from the pre-supermarket era, although at a  higher level of sophistication.

James Cunningham
Camps Bay

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