Clarence Saunders revolutionized the way we shop for food.

In the early 20th century you shopped at the local market, where the staff got the food for you (most of it was behind a counter) and calculated how much you owed (most prices weren’t marked). Shopping was a long process with lots of give-and-take between the shopper and store owner over prices and which brands to buy.

Clarence Saunders worked to change all of that. In 1916 he opened a new kind of store where customers did most of the work themselves.  They retrieved the food from various places in the store and they chose which brands to buy. In return for customers doing more work, they got lower prices, which were clearly marked on the items. The store had the odd name of Piggly Wiggly, and it was a success, capping out at over 2,600 stores at the height of its popularity.  Piggly Wiggly wasn’t the only company offering low prices in exchange for customers doing more of the work but they were the largest example of what became known as supermarkets.

Unfortunately for Saunders, his business got too big and he was forced out of the company.  Standing himself right back up again he started a new grocery store named “Clarence Saunders, sole-owner-of-my-name,” which, alas, eventually went out of business.

In 1945, the last year of World War II, he opened a new store which could have been as groundbreaking as Piggly Wiggly but which ended up going the way of Clarence Saunders, sole-owner-of-my-name.  The name of the grocery store was Keedoozle, and it was staffed by robots.  Customers walked along glass displays where they could see the food, and complicated contraptions gave them the food they selected.  However, the machines were too complicated and the whole experience was probably too strange.  It, too, went out of business.

Saunders died in October, 1953, while working on yet another project: a “Food-electric” store, which presumably would have also offered automated food dispensing to interested customers.