Self-Service

Piggly Wiggly, opened in Memphis on 6 September 1916, let customers take goods off the shelves themselves. The following year the shop itself was patented. Look at the drawing: it shows a one-way path zigzagging from entrance to exit, laid out so that shoppers pass in front of every shelf. This invention — handing part of the shop assistant's job to the customer — runs on through supermarkets and convenience stores to today's self-checkout. Recent scholarship treats it as the starting point of a technology for replacing paid labour with the unpaid labour of customers. The inventor's own later life is something else. In 1923, with his stock under attack from short sellers, Saunders borrowed ten million dollars and cornered it, driving the price from $39 to $124 — but the exchange ruled the corner complete and suspended trading, his financing ran out, and he went bankrupt, losing even his mansion. He was undeterred: almost immediately he opened a chain named, in effect, «the sole owner of my name».