In this episode of Memphis Type History: The Podcast, Rebecca meets with Caroline Mitchell Carrico at the Pink Palace to learn the insane story of the man who started Piggly Wiggly and the concept of grocery stores as we know them today. Hear how he lost it all in a gamble and then started the brilliant process back over.

Caroline Mitchell Carrico is the Supervisor of Exhibits and Graphic Services at the Memphis Pink Palace Museum. That means she researches and writes for the exhibits at the museum and also has a hand at the designs and installations of the exhibits as well. The massive project they have been working on is a complete redesign of the Pink Palace mansion. She’s been working on it for about 3 years now. You'll hear a little bit about what we can expect to find in the new layout.

Clarence Saunders, The Idea Man

Caroline gives a bit of Clarence Saunders job history. One of his first jobs was at a country store. You could buy anything you want to there. That’s where his start was and then through a series of job transitions, he landed as a Wholesale Drummer in Memphis. That’s the person who would go to all the different country stores and drum up business. He would convince the store owners to buy things and talk to them about how to improve their sales and improve their products. He developed enough ideas to decide he wanted to start up his own store. Carolynn talks about how he got together with a group of other store owners and started the United Stores company in town, where they did bulk purchasing. And she also talks about how the old country stores ran during this time.

Clarence decided his store would be a cash-only store, and it would be a self-service grocery store. He set up the store so that you had to walk through the entire store through a serpentine path so you had to walk through every item. At first, people had to rent a shopping basket but then he quickly changed that so you could just borrow the shopping basket at the front and then the only time you interacted with the staff was at the end of the store when you were paying. At the time, a lot of grocery stores let you order your items and they would deliver it to you. But Clarence did away with that. People bought their items and took it home with them.

The store we’re talking about is Piggly Wiggly and Clarence Saunders made sure to patent the self service design. He actually got numerous patents, such as the store fixtures. There were arguments that there were already other self service style stores but Clarence was the first person to franchise it and turn it into a really big model that fundamentally changed the way that we shop.

Carolyn says Clarence Saunders did his own advertising as well and it was quite the advertisement. Here's an ad she provided for our reading enjoyment. 

His store also essentially changed advertising for products as well because if people were now passing through goods and deciding which products to buy, businesses would need to make sure their product stood out from the others.

One story is he was on a train and saw a bunch of pigs wiggling to get under a fence. Another story is during time he opened the store there was syndicated stories that ran in the newspaper called Uncle Wiggly’s bedtime tales and people speculate that it may have come from that.

It’s also possible that he just completely made up a funny name to be memorable but also possi