click image to enlarge Colonial Store, Langley Circle, Hampton Va., 1950s. Photo courtesy of www.groceteria.com

click image to enlarge Bake shop, Grand Union Super Market, East Paterson, New Jersey, April 1952 Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection

click image to enlarge Florists, Grand Union Super Market, East Paterson, New Jersey, April 1952 Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection

Grocery shoppers today have the luxury of browsing through well-stocked aisles and handpicking items that appeal to their tastes and whims. But that wasn’t always the case. In the early days, shoppers handed their grocery orders to a clerk in a dry-goods store who would gather the merchandise from the shelves or measure out appropriate amounts of staples such as sugar and flour.

Clarence Saunders, who opened Piggy Wiggly in 1916 in Memphis, Tenn., was disenchanted with the old process, believing that it wasted time and productivity. His solution—let shoppers gather their own merchandise—eventually revolutionized the industry. Piggy Wiggly was the first grocery store to offer shopping baskets, open shelves, and checkout stands. It also introduced refrigerated cases to keep produce fresh.

King Kullen, the first true supermarket according to the Smithsonian Institution, opened in 1930 in Queens, N.Y. As stores grew in size, they began varying their inventories, adding fruits and vegetables, dairy products, bread and meat, muscling in on area green grocers, bakeries, and butchers.

A&P created one of the most well-known marketing campaigns in the industry, the green stamp program. Shoppers collected the stamps and redeemed them for premium items. Supermarkets and grocery stores today use that same concept in the form of reward cards.

By the 1950s, supermarkets were the rage, springing up in suburban strip malls and catering to a clientele able to carry a week’s worth of groceries home in their station wagons and sedans. In 1951, Albertsons opened the first of several experimental combination food and drug stores to be built during that decade. The convenience made sense to shoppers, and pharmacies are now found in the majority of large supermarkets.

It was also during the 1950s that Safeway opened its first glass-arched “Marina” store (named after Marina Boulevard in San Francisco) that would become a signature look for Safeway stores across the country. Meanwhile in metropolitan Washington, D.C., Giant Food rolled out such innovations as automatic doors, mechanized checkouts, and open display cases for meat and frozen foods. By 1955, supermarkets were responsible for 60 percent of grocery sales in the United States.

Fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s, when supermarkets began merging to form mega-chains. Today, supermarkets, both large and small, compete with big-box discounters such as Wal-Mart, Costco, and Sam’s Club, which have expanded into the grocery category.

But supermarkets continue to hold their own, offering a diverse variety of foods from around the world and services that range from greeting cards and flowers to video rentals and take-home dinners. Some incorporate bank branches and dry cleaners into the mix. Although a far cry from the dry-goods stores of the past, today’s grocery markets provide an atmosphere of comfort and convenience that is welcomingly familiar.