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Pandemic Parallels: The History of the Grocery Cart
A hundred years ago, the way we shopped for groceries looked very similar to the way we order online today. Of course the Internet didn’t exist a century ago, but the shopping model that we are reverting back to is in fact very retro. Since the coronavirus broke, this trend has skyrocketed with online food purchases increasing nearly 500% during the quarantine for one conventional North American grocery chain. Today, we “hand over” our digital shopping lists, compiled with all our items at checkout. In 1920, unless your family was wealthy aristocracy who could afford to outsource the task, most of our grandparents pushed their shopping lists across the counter for the clerk to gather. This model of ordering groceries to be picked up or delivered was common until September 16, 1916 when the very first self-service Piggly Wiggly with aisles for customers to browse through opened in Memphis, Tennessee. The 1918 flu pandemic followed just two years later. It is a timeline that eerily echoes our own recent history, a century later in 2017, when American grocers were pushed to ramp up their e-commerce strategies and innovate to compete with Amazon and Instacart’s massive marketshares.¹ Two years after reverting back to full-service, we too are coincidently plagued by a pandemic.
The Red Cross reported that many people died not from symptoms of the 1918 flu, but…
