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Grocery shopping in a supermarket is such a commonplace part of everyday existence that it is routinely mocked as a ritual of narcotized consumerism. In fact, the modern supermarket is a radical break with the past—and a nexus of innovations central to contemporary life. Markets have existed for millennia, of course. But they were nothing like the modern grocery store, with its shopping carts, self-service selection, shelves of branded, packaged goods, and lineup of cash registers. Walk the store aisles with Virginia Postrel and Charles C. Mann as they explore the now-invisible network of technologies that arose to create the supermarket.
Nowadays a Cracker Barrel is a restaurant where you eat down-home food amid rustic décor. But crackers and other provisions used to actually come in big wooden barrels from which store proprietors scooped out and weighed goods for customers. They represented a whole lost world of grocery shopping. Service was personal, choices were limited, prices were high, and quality was inconsistent. This is where “bottom of the barrel” originates. You didn’t want crackers—or flour or anything else—from down there.
The cracker-barrel model fell under attack in the mid-19th century, with the arrival of the first packaged goods—items made in factories, stuffed into branded boxes, and transported to stores.
But the real beginning of the end was February 1898, when 114 different bakeries making a host of different products merged into a cookie colossus: the National Biscuit Company (today known as Nabisco). Its head, Adolphus Green, dreamed of making a single baked good that could be sold across the nation—an identical product, identically fresh, identically packaged, sold everywhere from Boston to Bakersfield. Green’s dream would become a landmark in the history of consumption.
Subjects discussed include:
- Fig Newtons, Origin of
- Actors in the Aisles
- Inflation, Effect on Price Stickers
- Fame of Tristam Shandy, Lack of
- Uneeda Biscuits
- Architecture of Shopping
- Frank Peters, Package Prodigy
- Self-Service as Means of Fighting Segregation and Sexism
- Bar-Code Brilliance
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References, further reading, and credits:
The Nabisco story,from the invaluable American Business History Center
Fun short account of Adolphus Green and Frank Peters: David Traxel, 1898: The Birth of the American Century, 1998, pp. 287-295.
Out of the Cracker Barrel;: The Nabisco Story, From Animal Crackers to Zuzus by William Kahn
General origins of packaged food: Anne Murcott, The (Not So) Secret Lives of Food Packaging, 2024.
Clarence Saunders, Piggly Wiggly, and effects of self-service shopping: Lisa C. Tolbert, Beyond Piggly Wiggly: Inventing the American Self-Service Store, 2023. Slightly exaggerated but fun short video on the same thing. Parallel story about African-American customers and Sears catalogue.
The Cart That Changed the World: The Career of Sylvan N. Goldman by Terry P. Williams
Origin of the bar code: The History of the Bar Code, Smithsonian, 2015. Earliest bar-code scanner, on display at the Smithsonian.