June 17, 2008
Whence Cometh “The Pig”?
Twice within the past week here at clusterflock I have alluded to the Piggly-Wiggly. (These references may be found here and here.) For the benefit of readers outside the US of A (and for readers in those thirty-one of the forty-eight contiguous United States of America not possessed of a Piggly-Wiggly), I offer the following gloss.
Piggly Wiggly®, America’s first true self-service grocery store, was founded in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916 by Clarence Saunders. In grocery stores of that time, shoppers presented their orders to clerks who gathered the goods from the store shelves. Saunders, a flamboyant and innovative man, noticed this method resulted in wasted time and man hours, so he came up with an unheard-of solution that would revolutionize the entire grocery industry: he developed a way for shoppers to serve themselves.
Despite predictions that this new kind of store would fail, the first Piggly Wiggly opened September 6, 1916 at 79 Jefferson Street in Memphis. Operating under the unusual name Piggly Wiggly, it was unlike any other grocery store of that time. Shopping baskets, open shelves, no clerks to shop for the customer — unheard of!
I have always (correctly, as it happens) regarded Piggly-Wiggly as a southern US phenomenon and was mildly confounded when Dick’s (our supermarket here in the Illinois patch of the Driftless Region) was taken over by “The Pig”.
Besides, I find it embarrassing to speak the phrase “Piggly-Wiggly” and so continue to refer to “Dick’s”, as do most locals.
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“[Clarence] Saunders’ reason for choosing the intriguing name Piggly Wiggly ® remains a mystery; he was curiously reluctant to explain its origin. One story is that he saw from a train window several little pigs struggling to get under a fence, and the rhyming name occurred to him then. Someone once asked him why he had chosen such an unusual name for his organization, and Saunders’ reply was, “So people will ask that very question.’ He wanted and found a name that would be talked about and remembered.”
My first memory of a supermarket was The Pig in North Park (Rockford), IL. Circa 1960-ish.
I believe it later became an Eagle, then perhaps most recently a Logli.
So! The Pig has been rooting around northern Illinois for a good long while.
Logli? Is that some Abruzzo chain store moving into the American Heartland? Can you get good olive oil there? Figs?