![]() ![]() ‘A sales department’ was deliberately designed to allow customers to wander around the aisle and select their needed groceries. In his newly designed grocery store, he divided the store into three different areas: A ‘front lobby’ served as an entrance, an exit, and included checkouts at the front. In 1902, Saunders moved to Memphis to put his perspective into practice, that is, to establish a grocery wholesale cooperative. Having noticed that this inconvenient shopping mode could lead to tremendous consumption of time and money, Saunders, with great enthusiasm and innovation, proposed an unprecedented solution-let the consumers do self-service in the process of shopping-which might bring a thorough revolution to the whole industry. Without the assistance of computers at that time, shopping was performed in a quite backward way. During his working in the store, he found that it was very inefficient for people to buy things there. Born in Virginia, Clarence Saunders left school at the age of 14 in 1895 to work first as a clerk in a grocery store. Such early chain stores as A&P stores, although containing full services, were very time-consuming and inefficient for the purchase. Generally speaking, these grocery stores sold only one brand for each item. For the purpose of saving time, customers had to ask delivery boys or go in person to send the lists of what they intended to buy to the stores in advance and then went to pay for the goods later. At the very beginning of the 20th century, the American grocery stores offered comprehensive services: the customers would ask help from the people behind the counters (called clerks) for the items they liked, and then the clerks would wrap the items up.
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