超市的起源
The Innovation of Grocery Stores

The bank is full-service, providing all kinds of financial services for individuals and businesses.
這家銀行提供全方位服務，提供個人與企業各種金融服務。

Strategic planning is an extremely time-consuming process.
策略規劃是一個非常花費時間的過程。

The clerk will wrap your purchases for you.
店員會幫你包好你買的東西。

A shopkeeper is someone who owns or is in charge of a small shop.
店主是擁有或負責一家小型商店的人。

Our business is wholesale only.
我們只做批發生意。

The ageing process doesn't start at the same time for everyone.
每個人老化過程的起始點都不一樣。

To expedite means to make something happen more quickly.
「加速」就是讓某件事物更快發生。

The politician's flamboyant lifestyle was well known.
這位政治家的生活方式是出了名的誇張造作。

This new technology is going to revolutionize everything we do.
這項新科技將會徹底改變我們的生活。

A checkout is a point at which goods are paid for in a supermarket.
收銀台就是在超市裡付款購買物品的地點。

The Innovation of Grocery Stores

At the beginning of the 20th century, grocery stores in the United States were full-service. A customer would ask a clerk behind the counter for specific items and the clerk would package the items, which were limited to dry goods. If they want to save some time, they have to ask a delivery boy or by themselves to send the note of what they want to buy to the grocery store first and then go to pay for the goods later. These grocery stores usually carried only one brand of each good. There were early chain stores, such as the A&P Stores, but these were all entirely full-service and very time-consuming.

In 1885, a Virginia boy named Clarence Saunders began working part-time as a clerk in a grocery store when he was 14 years old, and quit school when the shopkeeper offered him full time work with room and board. Later he worked in an Alabama coke plant and in a Tennessee sawmill before he returned to the grocery business. By 1900, when he was nineteen years old, he was earning $30 a month as a salesman for a wholesale grocer. During his years working in the grocery stores, he found that it was very inconvenient and inefficient for people to buy things because more than a century ago, long before there were computers, shopping was done quite differently than it is today. Entering a store, the customer would approach the counter (or wait for a clerk to become available) and place an order, either verbally or, as was often the case for boys running errands, in the form of a note or list. While the customer was waiting the clerk would move behind the counter and throughout the store, select the items on the list—some form shelves so high that long-handled grasping device had to be used—and bring them back to the counter to be tallied and bagged or boxed. The process might be expedited by the customer calling or sending in the order beforehand, or by the order being handled by a delivery boy on a bike, but otherwise it did not vary greatly. Saunders, a flamboyant and innovative man, noticed that this method resulted in wasted time and expense, 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.

So in 1902 he moved to Memphis where he developed his concept to form a grocery wholesale cooperative and a full-service grocery store. For his new ‘cafeteria grocery’, Saunders divided his grocery into three distinct areas:

1) A front ‘lobby’ forming an entrance and exit and checkouts at the front.

2) A sales department, which was specially designed to allow customers to roam the aisles and select their own groceries. Removing unnecessary clerks, creating elaborate aisle displays, and rearranging the store to force customers to view all of the merchandise and over the shelving and cabinets units of sales department were ‘galleries’, where supervisors were allowed to keep an eye on the customers while not disturbing them.