69 Fun Facts About Grocery Store

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

Piggly Wiggly customers entered through a turnstile and walked four aisles past 605 packaged items, paying at the exit; founder Clarence Saunders patented the self-service layout in 1917.

The first true supermarket, King Kullen, opened in 1930 inside what kind of building in Queens?

A former garage at 171-06 Jamaica Avenue held the 6,000-square-foot store that Michael J. Cullen opened on 4 August 1930; the Smithsonian recognises it as the first supermarket.

Who introduced one of the first shopping carts in 1937, in his Humpty Dumpty stores in Oklahoma?

Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Humpty Dumpty chain in Oklahoma City, introduced his wheeled basket carrier on 4 June 1937; the invention eventually made him a multimillionaire.

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 ever scanned with a UPC barcode at a checkout, in 1974?

A pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum rang up at 8:01 a.m. on 26 June 1974 at a Marsh supermarket in Ohio, for 67 cents, the first purchase scanned with a Universal Product Code.

In which Ohio town did that first barcode scan take place?

Troy, about 20 miles north of Dayton, had the Marsh supermarket chosen for the trial; Marsh was an Indiana chain founded by Ermal Marsh in Muncie in 1931.

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 Bernard, aged 23, open his first grocery in 1883, founding the chain that bears his name?

Cincinnati: Bernard opened his Great Western Tea Company store there in 1883 with his life savings, and in 1901 his chain became the first grocer to run its own bakery.

In which Arkansas town did Sam and Bud Walton open the first Walmart in 1962?

Rogers, Arkansas saw the first Wal-Mart Discount City open on 2 July 1962; Sam had run a Walton's Five and Dime in nearby Bentonville, which became the company's headquarters.

Sam Walton's first store, in Newport, Arkansas in 1945, was a franchise of which chain?

Ben Franklin, the Butler Brothers variety-store franchise, was Sam Walton's first shop, opened in Newport, Arkansas in 1945; he lost the lease in 1950 and moved to Bentonville.

Which chain was the largest grocery retailer in the United States from 1915 all the way to 1975?

A&P, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, had more than 15,000 stores by 1930 and finally closed for good in 2015.

What did A&P originally sell when it started in New York in 1859?

Tea and coffee were the stock of George Gilman's Great American Tea Company from 1859; the Great Atlantic & Pacific name followed in 1869, the year the transcontinental railroad was completed.

Why was the name Safeway chosen in 1926?

The stores were cash-only and gave no credit, so the 1926 name pitched shopping 'the safe way' that kept customers out of debt; Marion Skaggs had run his earlier Idaho stores on the same cash-and-carry basis.

Which Florida chain, founded in 1930, is wholly owned by its present and past employees?

Publix opened its first store in Winter Haven, Florida in 1930 under George Jenkins; his 1940 Winter Haven 'food palace' boasted air conditioning, fluorescent lighting and electric-eye doors.

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.

The Texas chain H-E-B was founded in 1905 by Florence Butt in which town?

Kerrville, in the Texas Hill Country, was where Florence Butt opened her grocery in 1905 with $60, on the ground floor of the family's rented home.

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

Wegmans began in 1916 when brothers John and Walter Wegman opened the Rochester Fruit and Vegetable Company, selling from a pushcart; the family chain is based in Rochester.

What was Hendrik Meijer's trade before opening a grocery in Greenville, Michigan, in 1934?

Barber: Hendrik Meijer ran a barbershop in Greenville, Michigan and in 1934 filled an empty storefront he owned with groceries; his 14-year-old son Fred helped and later ran the company.

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

Amazon closed the $13.7 billion deal in August 2017 and cut prices on staples at Whole Foods the day it took over; Whole Foods Market itself had started in Austin in 1980.

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 vegetarian store John Mackey and Renee Lawson opened in 1978 with $45,000 borrowed from family and friends; the pair lived above the shop.

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

Seattle's first Costco opened on 15 September 1983 on 4th Avenue South, founded by retail veteran Jim Sinegal and lawyer Jeffrey Brotman.

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

The Washington suburb where it was once headquartered: Costco moved its head office to Kirkland in 1987, launched the Kirkland Signature label while based there, and relocated to Issaquah in 1996.

Which San Diego warehouse retailer, opened in 1976 in old Howard Hughes hangars, later merged with Costco?

Price Club, Sol Price's members-only warehouse, opened in 1976 on Morena Boulevard in hangars once used by Howard Hughes; after rebuffing Sam's Club it merged with Costco in 1993 as PriceCostco.

The name Aldi is a shortening of what?

Albrecht Diskont was compressed to Aldi in 1962; brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht had taken over their mother's corner shop in Essen in 1946 and built a chain of discount stores.

The Albrecht brothers' company split in two in 1960. What are the two halves called?

They divide the world between them, except the US, where Aldi Süd runs Aldi and Aldi Nord owns Trader Joe's.

Which US chain did Theo Albrecht of Aldi Nord buy in 1979?

Trader Joe's was sold by founder Joe Coulombe to Theo Albrecht in 1979; Coulombe stayed on as chief executive until 1988.

In which US state did Aldi Süd open its first American store in 1976?

Iowa City got Aldi's first American store in 1976, a foothold that grew past 2,000 US stores by 2020; in 2024 Aldi took over about 400 Winn-Dixie and Harveys stores in the Southeast.

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

Pasadena's Arroyo Parkway store opened in August 1967 with Hawaiian shirts and a nautical theme; the company later settled its headquarters in Monrovia.

What convenience-store chain did Joe Coulombe run before his rebrand, worried it looked too much like 7-Eleven?

Pronto Market stores, a small Los Angeles convenience chain Coulombe had run since 1958, looked doomed when 7-Eleven arrived, so he dreamed up the South Seas theme on a Caribbean holiday, riffing on Trader Vic's.

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

Two Buck Chuck took its name from the $1.99 price at which the chain launched Charles Shaw wine in California in 2002; Fred Franzia's Bronco Wine Company made it from surplus California grapes.

How many items does a Joe Coulombe-founded store typically stock, versus 50,000 in a normal supermarket?

4,000 or so products fill a typical store, against 50,000 in a conventional supermarket; roughly 80% of them carry the chain's own labels, which keeps prices down.

How did the British chain Tesco get its name?

From a tea supplier's initials plus the founder's surname: in 1924 Jack Cohen bought tea from T. E. Stockwell and joined TES to the first two letters of Cohen.

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

Pile it high and sell it cheap was Jack Cohen's creed from 1919, when he began selling war-surplus groceries from a stall in Well Street Market, Hackney.

In what year did Tesco launch its Clubcard loyalty scheme?

1995 saw the Clubcard launch nationally in February, and that same year Tesco overtook Sainsbury's as Britain's biggest grocer; a later blackmailer signing himself 'Sally' demanded cards modified to withdraw cash from ATMs.

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.

The French chain that opened Europe's first hypermarket has a name meaning what?

Crossroads is the literal meaning of the chain's name; its first shop opened in 1960 near a crossroads in Annecy, and the company opened Europe's first hypermarket in 1963.

Which French retailer did Gérard Mulliez found in Roubaix in 1961?

Auchan was founded by Gérard Mulliez in 1961 in the Hauts-Champs district of Roubaix, which gave the chain its name; the Mulliez family also controls Decathlon and Leroy Merlin.

How did the German discounter Lidl get its name?

Dieter Schwarz bought the rights to a retired teacher's surname, paying Ludwig Lidl 1,000 marks in 1973, because the obvious alternative, Schwarz-Markt, means black market in German.

What did 7-Eleven's stores sell when the company 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 is the earliest documented coupon, issued in 1888?

A free glass of Coca-Cola was the offer Asa Candler's company printed on tickets from 1888; by 1913 an estimated one in nine Americans had redeemed one, some 8.5 million free drinks.

The word "grocer" comes from a French word meaning what?

Wholesaler is the sense of Old French grossier, a dealer in gross quantities; the Anglo-Latin grossarius lies behind both grocer and the 'gross' of twelve dozen.

In which city did the US stage Supermarket USA in 1957, the first American-style supermarket in a communist country?

Zagreb's international trade fair hosted Supermarket USA in September 1957, a 10,000-square-foot working store stocked with American goods, part of the US government's Cold War trade-fair programme.

How much did the founder of the Ohio chain that bears his surname invest to open his first store in 1883?

$372 was Bernard's entire life savings when he opened the Great Western Tea Company in 1883, aged 23; he was the fifth of ten children of German immigrants.

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

Keedoozle, opened in Memphis in 1937, had customers insert a key to record items on punched tape; a conveyor delivered the goods to the front, but the machinery kept failing.

How did the shopping cart's inventor persuade reluctant shoppers to try it in 1937?

He hired models to push them around the store: paid men and women wheeled carts through the aisles while greeters explained them, until customers copied them; Goldman became a multimillionaire.

The Albrecht brothers reportedly split Aldi in two in 1960 over a disagreement about selling what?

Theo took the north and Karl the south; the two companies still divide Germany along the so-called Aldi Equator.

Costco's hot dog and drink combo was first priced at $1.50 in which year?

1985 is when the quarter-pound hot dog and soda combo settled at $1.50; co-founder Jim Sinegal later told his successor Craig Jelinek he would kill him if the price ever rose.

In the 1960s, which trading stamp company issued more stamps every year than the US Postal Service?

Sperry & Hutchinson, founded in 1896, printed three times as many Green Stamps as the Post Office issued postage stamps at its 1960s peak; its redemption catalogue went out 35 million times a year.

7-Eleven took its name in 1946 from what?

Its opening hours, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week, were unheard of in 1946, when the Southland Corporation renamed its Tote'm Stores to advertise them.

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

The founder's son who took over the store was Howard Edward Butt, Florence's youngest, who ran it from 1919 and put his own initials on the business as it grew across Texas.

Otto Rohwedder's bread-slicing machine was first put to use in 1928 by a bakery in which state?

Missouri's Chillicothe Baking Company sold the first machine-sliced loaves on 7 July 1928 using Rohwedder's invention; within five years around 80% of American bread was sold sliced.

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

Sliced bread was banned from 18 January 1943 by food administrator Claude Wickard to save the heavier waxed paper it needed and steel for blades; public outrage got the order lifted on 8 March.

The one-piece plastic shopping bag was patented in 1965 by Celloplast, a company from which country?

Sweden's Celloplast, based in Norrköping, patented engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin's design in 1965: a flat plastic tube folded, welded and die-cut into a bag that he intended to be reused many times.

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.

The egg carton was invented in 1911 by a BC newspaper editor to settle a dispute between a farmer and whom?

A hotel owner in Aldermere, near Smithers, kept complaining of broken eggs from a local farmer; newspaper editor Joseph Coyle overheard the row in 1911 and designed the paper egg carton to end it.

Who hosted the 1990s Lifetime revival of the game show 'Supermarket Sweep'?

David Ruprecht fronted the Lifetime version for five years from 1990 and a PAX revival from 2000; Bill Malone had hosted the 1965 ABC original, and Leslie Jones the 2020 relaunch.

Grocery delivery company Instacart was founded in 2012 by whom?

Apoorva Mehta, a former supply-chain engineer, founded Instacart in San Francisco in 2012 at 26, after reportedly abandoning about 20 earlier startup ideas; he stepped down as chief executive in 2021.

On produce stickers, a four-digit PLU code prefixed with which digit shows the fruit is organic?

9 in front of the four-digit code, making 94011 for organic bananas, marks organic produce under the International Federation for Produce Standards scheme; conventional items use the 3000s and 4000s.

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?

None; it just borrowed the name: the founders liked the famous American brand, registered it because F. W. Woolworth had not, and opened in Sydney's Imperial Arcade in December 1924 as 'Woolworths Stupendous Bargain Basement'.

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

Five lorries driving between villages around Zurich in August 1925 carried just coffee, rice, sugar, pasta, coconut fat and soap; Duttweiler's ban on selling alcohol and tobacco was reaffirmed by a members' vote in 2022.

Which 1990 US law made the black-and-white calories and Daily Values panel mandatory on packaged foods?

Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, signed by George H. W. Bush in November 1990, produced the Nutrition Facts panel; Burkey Belser's design reached packages in May 1994 and won a Presidential Design Award in 1997.

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

Stew Leonard's opened in Norwalk in 1969 as a dairy store with a petting zoo and singing animatronics; the original made the Guinness Book of Records for the highest sales per square foot of any single food store.

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

Boise's first Albertsons opened on 21 July 1939 with an in-store bakery, a magazine rack and an automatic doughnut machine; the Idaho chain later absorbed Safeway in a merger completed in 2015.

Clarence Birdseye's company first test-sold quick-frozen foods in 1930 in stores around which Massachusetts city?

Springfield, Massachusetts shoppers at 18 stores saw the first Birds Eye Frosted Foods on 6 March 1930; Birdseye had learned fast-freezing from Inuit in Labrador, and his firm leased freezer cabinets to the shops.

Which Wall Street financier engineered the 1926 merger that created the modern Safeway chain?

Charles Merrill bought the 322-store Safeway chain of southern California and merged it with M. B. Skaggs' stores in 1926, instantly creating the biggest grocer west of the Mississippi, and kept Skaggs in charge.

Which supermarket opened in a former car plant in Elizabeth, New Jersey in December 1932?

Big Bear opened in December 1932 in a disused Durant car factory in Elizabeth, and its first-year sales of about $3.8 million exceeded those of a hundred conventional chain stores; established chains then began building supermarkets of their own.

In which South London district did the UK's first supermarket, under the Premier Supermarkets brand, open?

Streatham got Britain's first supermarket in 1951 after ex-US Navy sailor Patrick Galvani pitched the idea to Express Dairies; the store took ten times a typical shop's weekly revenue.