The Origin of Supermarket - 3rd revolution for retailing industry

9th, September, Year 1916, Piggly Wiggly, the first self-help service store opened in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1917, Clarence Sanders, the operator applied for a patent for the retail store business model in which consumers select goods on the shelf and finally settle bill checkout. This is the embryonic form of the supermarket. Afterwards supermarkets quickly took popular around the world like storm.

August 1930, American Michael Cullen (Michael Cullen) set up the first store in New York State, the U.S. Coulomb store. At that time, the United States was in a period of great economic crisis. Michael Coulomb accurately designed a low-price strategy based on his decades of experience in food management, and pioneered a pricing method for product categories. His average gross profit margin was only 9%, which is surprising compared to the 25-40% gross profit margin of general stores in the United States at that time. In order to ensure the low price, the purchase price must be low. Only a large amount of purchase can lower the purchase price. Michael Coulomb set up a semicolon in a chain manner and established a sales system that guarantees a large amount of purchase. He pioneered self-service sales mode, adopt a one-time centralized settlement check out.

After the mid-1930s, the retail organization of supermarkets gradually spread from the United States to Japan and Europe.

Chile is one of the first Latin American countries to have supermarkets. In 1957, Chile's first supermarket "ALMAC" appeared at the intersection of PROVIDENCIA and RICARDO LEON, the current old wealthy district of Santiago. This so-called supermarket, in the eyes of modern people, is just a store. It's just a primitive supermarket that is neither small nor rich. Today, Chile has 668 large and small supermarkets. Among them, there are 36 large supermarkets covering an area of about 10,000 square meters, with a total construction area of 324,000 square meters. There are 21 companies in the Capital Region (11 LIDER, 5 JUMBO, 5 CARREFOUR), 15 in other regions; 632 companies are less than 10,000 square meters, with a total construction area of 808,800 square meters. There are 178 in the Capital Region and 454 in other regions. The total sales of supermarkets in 2002 was 4.344 billion US dollars, which was 7% of the national GDP that year and 60% of the national retail sales.