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Talk of the bay

Super shopping idea marks 75th anniversary

By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published August 8, 2005

How about a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday for the supermarket, that ubiquitous icon of modern life that is celebrating its 75th year.

The first supermarket was opened Aug. 4, 1930, in Queens, N.Y., by an entrepreneur who quit his job as a Kroger Co. store manager after his bosses in Cincinnati refused to bankroll his brainstorm.

Michael Cullen was even willing to alter his name to make the King Kullen nameplate stand out. Other grocers, including the dominant chains of the day - A&P, Kroger and Safeway - later followed Cullen's lead. Publix Super Markets, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, introduced the first Florida supermarket in Winter Haven in 1940.

King Kullen was the first store to unite under one roof a wide variety of groceries, meat, dairy products and baked goods in a self-service environment that featured a low-margin, high-volume pricing formula.

Until then grocery stores sold only about 700 food items in bulk. Shoppers had to go elsewhere for meat, dairy products and baked goods. The low-volume corner grocer had to charge far higher prices.

Cullen's plan: sell 300 items at cost, 200 at 5 percent above cost and the other 500 items at 15 to 20 percent above cost. The blended inventory would sell at 9 percent over cost, about half the gross margin of today's supermarkets.

"There was a lot of skepticism whether Cullen could get enough business to make the pricing formula work," said Bill Greer, spokesman for the Food Marketing Institute, an industry trade group. "It was a low-price sensation that spread partly because of the Depression."

It was the same year Clarence Birdseye introduced frozen foods as home refrigerators emerged as an affordable reality in stores and homes.

Self-service had been around since Piggly Wiggly introduced the idea in Memphis around the time of World War I. But the supermarket really spread like wildfire once an Oklahoma City supermarket owner seized on the idea that people quit shopping when their wicker baskets were full. He invented the shopping cart in 1937, which was quickly followed by free parking.

The first King Kullen was a renovated warehouse that offered 1,000 items in 37,000 square feet of space. Today the average supermarket is not much larger, but it's jammed with about 30,000 items. Americans spent about 6 percent of their annual disposable income on food in 2004, down from 21 percent in 1930, according to FMI.

[Last modified August 5, 2005, 19:27:02]