September 6, 1916. The first true self service grocery store, called Piggly Wiggly, opened in Memphis, and it completely changed the way people shop for food.
Before this, buying groceries was a slow, personal process. You handed a clerk your list, and he went around the store gathering everything for you while you waited. It was inefficient, required lots of staff, and gave shoppers no chance to browse.
A businessman named Clarence Saunders had a radical idea. What if customers just walked through the aisles themselves, picked their own items off the shelves, and carried them to a checkout counter at the front. He put price tags on everything and let people serve themselves.
It sounds completely ordinary now, because it became the model for virtually every supermarket on earth. Aisles, shelves you browse, a basket you fill, a checkout line at the end, all of it grew from this store. The entire modern shopping experience was invented when Piggly Wiggly opened its doors on this day.