A closer look
Clarence Saunders completely revolutionized global retail economics when he opened the first Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis back in 1916, inventing the modern self-service supermarket by forcing customers to gather their own groceries. Before this brilliant innovation, shoppers simply handed a list to a clerk who fetched the items for them, which was highly labor-intensive and resulted in massive overhead costs for small neighborhood store owners. By handing the customer a wooden basket and designing a maze-like layout to expose them to impulse buys, Saunders successfully convinced the public to perform free manual labor for his corporation while simultaneously increasing his profit margins. Every time you wander aimlessly through a massive retail labyrinth looking for cheap toilet paper, you are fiercely honoring a century-old economic trick designed to perfectly manipulate consumer psychology and drastically slash corporate employee payroll
