67 Fun Facts About Grocery Store

Which chain, opened in Memphis in 1916, is credited as the first true self-service grocery store?

Piggly Wiggly sent shoppers through a turnstile to pick goods off the shelves themselves instead of asking a clerk at the counter; founder Clarence Saunders patented the layout in 1917.

Why are eggs kept chilled in American supermarkets but sold off the shelf in much of Europe?

American eggs are washed, which strips the shell's natural protective coating, so they must be chilled to keep bacteria out; most European producers leave the coating on instead.

Grammar sticklers say supermarket express-lane signs reading '10 items or less' should use which word instead?

Fewer is the sticklers' word for things you can count; rather than take a side, Tesco rewrote its British checkout signs in 2008 to read 'Up to 10 items'.

What everyday object inspired the design of the first shopping cart?

A folding chair gave Goldman the template: he pictured a basket on the seat and wheels on the legs, and with mechanic Fred Young built a carrier that stacked flat when not in use.

What was the first product scanned with a UPC barcode at a checkout, in 1974?

A pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum was no lucky dip: the Marsh executive who played first shopper said he picked it to show a barcode could be printed on something that small.

Which company's engineer George Laurer designed the striped UPC barcode that supermarkets adopted in 1973?

IBM's George Laurer was expected to copy the round bull's-eye code that rival RCA was testing, but he refused because circles smeared when printed, and his rectangle of bars won.

In which chain was the first self-checkout machine installed, near Atlanta in 1986?

Kroger stores around Atlanta trialled CheckRobot's machines in 1986; the system, built by David Humble's firm in Deerfield Beach, Florida, had shoppers scan items and then pay a central cashier.

In which city did Barney Kroger open his grocery business in 1883, aged 23?

Cincinnati is where his Great Western Tea Company began; in 1901 he started baking his own bread, the first American grocer to do so, reckoning he could sell a fresher loaf for less.

Which Arkansas town, where Sam Walton opened a five-and-dime on the square in 1950, is still Walmart's home?

Bentonville has been the company's base ever since, yet the first store actually called Walmart opened in 1962 in neighbouring Rogers.

Sam Walton's first store, opened in Newport, Arkansas in 1945, traded under which chain's name?

Ben Franklin's franchise did so well in Walton's hands that his landlord refused to renew the lease and handed the Newport store to his own son.

Which chain, with over 15,000 stores at its 1930s peak, was America's largest grocer until the 1970s?

A&P's size made it a target: independent grocers pressed Congress into the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act against chain-store discounts, and in the 1970s Safeway finally overtook it.

What did A&P's first stores sell in 1860s New York?

Tea and coffee: the firm kept prices low by selling direct, with no middleman's markup, and the Great Atlantic & Pacific name followed in 1869, the year the transcontinental railroad was finished.

What did the Skaggs family's grocery chain, begun in Idaho and merged into Safeway in 1926, refuse to offer shoppers?

Credit: the Reverend Samuel Skaggs held that grocers' credit hurt farm families who saw cash only at harvest, so the chain his sons built, 428 stores by 1926, sold for cash alone.

Which Florida supermarket chain, founded in 1930, is owned by its employees and the Jenkins family?

Publix founder George Jenkins had managed a rival grocery in Winter Haven before opening his own store in 1930; today current and former employees hold most of the shares and his family much of the rest.

Where did the founder of Florida's employee-owned chain take its name from?

A struggling movie theatre company supplied the name: George Jenkins simply liked the sound of it when he opened his first store in Winter Haven in 1930.

H-E-B began after Florence Butt's family moved to the dry Texas Hill Country to treat which illness?

Tuberculosis had left her husband unable to work, so Florence Butt became the family breadwinner, opening a one-room grocery on the ground floor of their home in Kerrville.

Which New York chain made every Fortune Best Companies to Work For list from 1998 to 2024?

Wegmans, still run by the founding family, has long been praised for staff scholarships and benefits for part-timers; it began in Rochester in 1916 as the Rochester Fruit and Vegetable Company.

Which Midwestern chain did a Dutch-born barber start in 1934 by filling his empty Michigan storefront with groceries?

Meijer: in the Depression Hendrik Meijer could not find a tenant for the space beside his Greenville barbershop, so he stocked it himself, with his 14-year-old son Fred among the first staff.

Which company bought Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion in 2017?

Amazon's purchase took the online retailer into bricks-and-mortar groceries at a stroke; Whole Foods Market had begun in 1980 as a single store in Austin, Texas.

What was the name of the Austin store that John Mackey opened in 1978 before Whole Foods, spoofing a rival?

SaferWay, a dig at Safeway, was the health-food shop John Mackey opened with $45,000 raised from family and friends; two years later it merged with a rival natural grocer to become Whole Foods Market.

In which city did Costco open its first warehouse in 1983?

Seattle's first Costco opened in September 1983; co-founder Jim Sinegal had learned the trade under the San Diego retailer who pioneered warehouse clubs, and ten years later their two companies merged.

Costco's Kirkland Signature house brand is named after what?

The Washington suburb where it was once headquartered: the label launched from Kirkland in the mid-1990s and outlived the move to nearby Issaquah because, co-founder Jim Sinegal said, nobody could spell Issaquah.

Which San Diego warehouse retailer, opened in 1976 in a converted aircraft hangar, later merged with Costco?

Price Club at first sold only to small businesses, then found far more buying clout by admitting selected ordinary members too, the model warehouse clubs still follow; it merged with Costco in 1993.

After his 1971 kidnapping, Aldi co-founder Theo Albrecht went to court to claim what as a business expense?

His ransom: after a payment of millions of marks freed him from his kidnappers, Theo Albrecht argued in court that the money was a tax-deductible business expense; accounts differ on whether he won.

The brothers who founded Aldi split it into two companies that still trade under which names?

Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd: Theo took the shops in the north of West Germany and Karl those in the south, and the line between their territories is still nicknamed the Aldi equator.

Which US grocery chain did Aldi co-founder Theo Albrecht buy in 1979?

Trader Joe's was sold to Theo Albrecht by founder Joe Coulombe, yet it has never been merged with America's Aldi stores, which belong to his brother Karl's separate company.

Which British retailer sued Aldi in 2021, claiming its Cuthbert the Caterpillar cake copied Colin the Caterpillar?

Marks & Spencer said Aldi's Cuthbert rode on the coat-tails of Colin, its chocolate roll cake on sale since 1990; Aldi fought back online under the hashtag #FreeCuthbert.

In which California city did Joe Coulombe open his first South Seas-themed store in 1967?

Pasadena: Joe Coulombe aimed the store at well-educated, well-travelled shoppers whose tastes mainstream supermarkets ignored; the company's head office is now in nearby Monrovia.

Before his South Seas rebrand, Joe Coulombe ran which convenience chain, named with a word borrowed from Spanish?

Pronto Market stores, which Coulombe had run around Los Angeles since 1958, looked too much like 7-Eleven to survive its arrival, so he reinvented them with a South Seas theme.

What is the popular nickname of Charles Shaw wine, sold only at Joe Coulombe's chain?

Two Buck Chuck: Bronco Wine bought the name of a bankrupt Napa winery and put it on bottles the chain sold for $1.99 from 2002; the price has risen since, but the nickname stuck.

Which US chain picked its new name in the early 1980s partly because its Food Town signs needed only two new letters?

Food Lion: its Belgian owner Delhaize had a lion in its logo, and co-founder Ralph Ketner saw that the signs needed only a new L and I, since the O and N could be moved along.

How did the British chain Tesco get its name?

From a tea supplier's initials plus the founder's surname: Jack Cohen joined the TES of T. E. Stockwell to the CO of Cohen for a brand of tea in 1924, years before any shop carried the name.

What was Tesco founder Jack Cohen's famous business motto?

Pile it high and sell it cheap suited a man who began in 1919 selling groceries from a market stall in London's East End, about a decade before the first Tesco shop opened.

Which loyalty scheme did Tesco launch in 1995?

Clubcard arrived in February 1995, and within the year Tesco had overtaken Sainsbury's, long the market leader, to become Britain's biggest grocer.

On which London street did John James Sainsbury open his first shop in 1869?

Drury Lane, at number 173, housed the dairy shop John James Sainsbury and his wife Mary Ann opened in 1869; there were 128 branches when he died in 1928.

Which French retailer takes its name from the Hauts-Champs district of Roubaix?

Auchan is Hauts-Champs spelled the way it sounds: Gérard Mulliez opened the first store in that district in 1961, in a disused factory of his father's textile firm.

Why did Lidl founder Dieter Schwarz not put his own surname on his stores?

Schwarz-Markt means black market in German, so Dieter Schwarz paid a retired teacher named Ludwig Lidl 1,000 marks for the rights to his surname after reading about him in a newspaper.

What was 7-Eleven selling when it started in Dallas in 1927?

Ice was the product: in 1927 an employee at the Southland Ice Company's Dallas ice dock began selling milk, bread and eggs alongside it, and the Tote'm Stores grew from there.

Which country's company completed its full takeover of 7-Eleven in 2005?

Japan's Ito-Yokado rescued the bankrupt Southland Corporation with a 70% stake in 1991, and its successor Seven & i Holdings bought out the remaining shares in 2005.

What did the earliest documented coupon, issued in the 1880s, offer?

A free glass of Coca-Cola: the company handed out the tickets to get people to try its new drink, and by 1913 an estimated one in nine Americans had claimed one.

The word "grocer", a relative of "gross", comes from a French word meaning what?

Wholesaler: a medieval grocer was a merchant who dealt in bulk, by the gross, and only later did the word settle on the shopkeeper who sells food a bag at a time.

In 1957 the US built Supermarket USA, the first American-style supermarket in a communist state, at a trade fair in which country?

Yugoslavia: the working 10,000-square-foot store at the Zagreb trade fair was stocked with some 4,000 American products, Washington's way of showing off abundance to a communist public.

Which future Russian president toured a Texas supermarket in 1989 and was stunned by its full shelves?

Boris Yeltsin wandered a Randalls store after a NASA tour, marvelling that even the Politburo had no such choice; he wrote later that the crammed shelves left him sick with despair for the Soviet people.

What was Clarence Saunders' fully automated store, run like a giant vending machine, called?

Keedoozle shoppers pushed a key into slots beside display windows, and the goods they chose rode conveyor belts to the checkout; the machinery could not cope, and the stores never made money.

How did the shopping cart's inventor win over reluctant shoppers in 1937?

He hired models to use them: men had thought the carts effeminate and women said they had pushed enough prams, so seeing other shoppers wheel them around the store broke the ice.

The Albrecht brothers reportedly split Aldi in two over a disagreement about selling what?

Cigarettes: the story goes that the brothers could not agree on whether to stock them, though a German journalist has pointed out that Aldi was already selling them before the split.

Jim Sinegal told his Costco successor 'I will kill you' if he raised which price?

The hot dog combo had cost $1.50 since the 1980s when Craig Jelinek complained it was losing money; told to 'figure it out', he found savings elsewhere and left the price alone.

Which supermarket giveaway did Sperry & Hutchinson boast it printed in greater numbers than US postage stamps in the 1960s?

Green Stamps were handed out at the checkout, pasted into books by shoppers and traded, a book at a time, for goods from the S&H catalogue.

7-Eleven took its name in 1946 from what?

Its opening hours, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., were the selling point when the Southland Corporation renamed its Tote'm Stores in 1946; the name stayed even after stores began trading around the clock.

The Texas grocery chain H-E-B is named after the initials of which person?

The founder's youngest son, Howard Edward Butt, took over his mother Florence's shop in 1919; his first attempts to open branches failed before a store in Del Rio succeeded in 1926.

The word "coupon" comes from a French verb meaning what?

To cut: a coupon was at first a slip cut from a bond certificate to claim an interest payment, which is why shoppers still talk of clipping them.

In 1943, US officials briefly banned which everyday grocery item as a wartime conservation measure?

Sliced bread was banned in January 1943 partly to save the heavier waxed paper that kept cut loaves fresh; the order was dropped within two months, with officials admitting the savings were smaller than hoped.

Engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin's one-piece plastic shopping bag was patented in 1965 by Celloplast, a company from which country?

Sweden's Celloplast patented the bag, a plastic tube folded, welded and die-cut into shape; Thulin's son says his father meant it to be reused for years and to spare the trees felled for paper bags.

Who invented the machine that makes flat-bottomed brown paper grocery bags, in 1868?

Margaret Knight built her flat-bottom bag machine in 1868 and won an 1871 patent suit against Charles Annan, who had copied the design and argued a woman could not have understood the machinery.

Which grocery package did Canadian newspaperman Joseph Coyle invent in 1911 to end a farmer's feud with a hotel owner?

The egg carton: the hotel kept receiving the farmer's eggs broken, so Coyle, who published the local paper in British Columbia's Bulkley Valley, designed a carton with a cushioned slot for each egg.

Who hosted 'Supermarket Sweep' when Lifetime revived it in the 1990s?

David Ruprecht hosted the Lifetime run from 1990 to 1995 and its return on PAX in 2000; the 1960s original had been taped in real Food Fair supermarkets, the revival in a Hollywood studio.

Which grocery delivery company did engineer Apoorva Mehta found in 2012, after about 20 failed startup ideas?

Instacart: 'we were ordering everything online, except for groceries,' Mehta recalled, so he coded the first version of the app himself and launched it three weeks later.

On produce stickers, a five-digit PLU code beginning with 9 marks the fruit as what?

Organic: a 9 is simply put in front of the ordinary four-digit code, so the cashier can charge the organic price for fruit that looks just like the conventional kind.

Woodland and Silver's 1952 barcode patent extended which system into thick and thin bars?

Morse code dots and dashes, drawn in the sand on a Miami beach by Norman Joseph Woodland, became thick and thin lines; he and Bernard Silver then reshaped them into a bull's-eye of concentric circles for the 1952 patent.

How is Australia's supermarket chain Woolworths related to the American F. W. Woolworth company?

Only by a borrowed name: one Sydney founder dared another to register the famous American name, which proved free to use, and their 'Woolworths Stupendous Bargain Basement' opened in December 1924.

Switzerland's Migros began in 1925 with Gottlieb Duttweiler selling six basic goods from what?

Five lorries driving between villages carried just coffee, rice, sugar, pasta, coconut oil and soap; Duttweiler later kept alcohol out of his shops, and the co-operative's members voted in 2022 to keep it out.

Which president signed the law that put the Nutrition Facts panel on America's packaged foods?

George H. W. Bush signed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act in November 1990; as well as ordering the nutrition panel, it barred health claims on food labels unless federal regulators allowed them.

Which Connecticut grocer with singing animatronic animals did the New York Times dub the 'Disneyland of Dairy Stores'?

Stew Leonard's opened in Norwalk in 1969 as a dairy store where children could watch the milk being bottled; the original shop later made Guinness World Records for its sales per square foot.

Joe Albertson opened the first Albertsons store in 1939 in which state capital?

Boise's first Albertsons opened in 1939 after Joe Albertson left a manager's job at Safeway, the chain his own company took over in 2015.

Which financier, whose name lives on in a brokerage, engineered the 1926 merger that created the modern Safeway?

Charles Merrill, co-founder of Merrill Lynch, bought the Safeway stores of southern California and merged them with M. B. Skaggs's larger chain, keeping Skaggs on to run the combined business.

Eight months after it opened, the first Whole Foods Market was wrecked on Memorial Day 1981 by what?

A flood, Austin's worst in decades, ruined the uninsured store's stock and equipment at a cost of about $400,000; customers and neighbours helped clean up, and it reopened within a month.

After losing his first grocery chain in the 1920s, Clarence Saunders opened a rival chain under which name?

Sole Owner of My Name: a failed bid to corner his company's shares had cost Saunders the chain and its famous name, so he put his own over every door; the new stores prospered until the Depression.