70 Fun Facts About Grocery Store

Which chain, opened in Memphis in 1916, is credited as the first true self-service grocery store?

Customers entered through a turnstile and walked four aisles past 605 packaged items; founder Clarence Saunders patented the idea in 1917.

What did the founder of the first self-service chain say his store's odd two-word name meant?

He gave the same answer for his later automated store, Keedoozle, which people assumed meant "key does it all".

The first true supermarket, King Kullen, opened in 1930 inside what kind of building in Queens?

Founder Michael J. Cullen was a former Kroger employee, and the Smithsonian recognises his 6,000-square-foot store as the first.

Who introduced one of the first shopping carts in 1937, in his Humpty Dumpty stores in Oklahoma?

Customers ignored them at first, so he hired models to push carts around the store until they caught on.

What everyday object inspired the design of the first shopping cart?

Goldman put a basket on the seat and wheels on the legs, and called them "folding basket carriers".

What was the first product ever scanned with a UPC barcode at a checkout, in 1974?

It rang up at 8:01 a.m. at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, and a facsimile is now in the Smithsonian.

In which Ohio town did that first barcode scan take place?

The store belonged to Marsh Supermarkets, an Indiana chain founded by Ermal Marsh.

In which chain was the first self-checkout machine installed, near Atlanta in 1986?

It was built by CheckRobot of Deerfield Beach, Florida; NCR now has the biggest share of the market.

In which city did Bernard, aged 23, open his first grocery in 1883, founding the chain that bears his name?

He was 23 and invested his life savings of $372; Kroger became the first grocery chain to run its own bakery.

In which Arkansas town did Sam and Bud Walton open the first Walmart in 1962?

The company is headquartered in nearby Bentonville, where Sam had run Walton's Five and Dime.

Roughly how many people does Walmart employ, making it the world's largest private employer?

The Walton family still owns over half the company through Walton Enterprises.

Which chain was the largest grocery retailer in the United States from 1915 all the way to 1975?

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company had 15,000 stores by 1930 and finally closed for good in 2015.

What did A&P originally sell when it started in New York in 1859?

The name came in 1869, when the transcontinental railroad inspired the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company.

Why was the name Safeway chosen in 1926?

Marion Skaggs thought a chain that would outlive him should not carry his own name; Merrill Lynch's founder brokered the merger.

Which Florida chain, founded in 1930, is wholly owned by its present and past employees?

George Jenkins took the name from a struggling movie theatre chain because he liked the sound of it.

Where did the founder of Florida's employee-owned chain take its name from?

He had quit Piggly Wiggly after the CEO was too busy golfing to hear his ideas.

The Texas chain H-E-B was founded in 1905 by Florence Butt in which town?

She opened Mrs. Butt's Staple and Fancy Grocery on the ground floor of the family home; the initials are her son Howard Edward Butt's.

Which New York chain made every Fortune Best Companies to Work For list from 1998 to 2024?

It began in 1916 as the Rochester Fruit and Vegetable Company, run from a produce cart.

What was Hendrik Meijer's trade before opening a grocery in Greenville, Michigan, in 1934?

His 14-year-old son Fred was one of the first employees and later ran the company.

Which company bought Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion in 2017?

Whole Foods began in Austin in 1978 as a store called SaferWay, a spoof of Safeway.

What was the name of the Austin store that John Mackey opened in 1978 before Whole Foods, spoofing a rival?

He and Renee Lawson borrowed $45,000 from family and friends to open it.

In which city did Costco open its first warehouse in 1983?

Its Kirkland Signature label is named for the Seattle suburb where its headquarters later sat.

Costco's Kirkland Signature house brand is named after what?

The company moved to Kirkland in 1987 and later to Issaquah.

Which San Diego warehouse retailer, opened in 1976 in old Howard Hughes hangars, later merged with Costco?

Sol Price had turned down a merger with Walmart's Sam's Club before the 1993 PriceCostco deal.

The name Aldi is a shortening of what?

Brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht took over their mother's store in Essen in 1946 and adopted the name in 1962.

The Albrecht brothers' company split in two in 1960. What are the two halves called?

They divide the world between them, except the US, where Aldi Süd runs Aldi and Aldi Nord owns Trader Joe's.

Which US chain did Theo Albrecht of Aldi Nord buy in 1979?

He bought it from founder Joe Coulombe; it stayed with the Aldi Nord side of the family, run by his son Theo Jr. as of 2025.

In which US state did Aldi Süd open its first American store in 1976?

In 2024 it took over about 400 Winn-Dixie and Harveys stores across the Southeast.

In which California city did Joe Coulombe open his first South Seas-themed store in 1967?

The store is still trading; the company is headquartered in Monrovia.

What convenience-store chain did Joe Coulombe run before his rebrand, worried it looked too much like 7-Eleven?

He dreamed up the South Seas theme on a Caribbean holiday, riffing on the pricey Trader Vic's.

What is the popular nickname of Charles Shaw wine, sold only at Joe Coulombe's chain?

It launched at $1.99 in California, and by 2022 more than a billion bottles had been sold.

How many items does a Joe Coulombe-founded store typically stock, versus 50,000 in a normal supermarket?

Roughly 80% of them carry one of its own brand names.

How did the British chain Tesco get its name?

Jack Cohen bought tea from T. E. Stockwell and combined TES with the first letters of Cohen.

What was Tesco founder Jack Cohen's famous business motto?

He started in 1919 selling war-surplus groceries from a stall in Hackney's Well Street Market.

In what year did Tesco launch its Clubcard loyalty scheme?

A letter-bomber calling himself "Sally" later demanded the cards be modified to withdraw cash from ATMs.

On which London street did John James Sainsbury open his first shop in 1869?

By his death in 1928 there were more than 128 shops, and Sainsbury's led UK grocery for most of the 20th century.

The French chain that opened Europe's first hypermarket has a name meaning what?

The first shop opened in 1960 near a crossroads in Annecy, and in 1963 the company opened Europe's first hypermarket.

Which retailer opened Europe's first hypermarket, near Paris in 1963?

A hypermarket puts a supermarket and a department store under one roof; the first was in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.

How did the German discounter Lidl get its name?

He did not want to call it Schwarz-Markt, which means black market, and paid Ludwig Lidl 1,000 marks for the name.

What did 7-Eleven's stores sell when the company started in Dallas in 1927?

The Southland Ice Company renamed its stores 7-Eleven in 1946 for their 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. hours.

Which country's company completed its full takeover of 7-Eleven in 2005?

Ito-Yokado bought a 70% stake in 1991 and the rest in 2005; by 2025 the chain had roughly 85,000 stores.

What is the earliest documented coupon, issued in 1888?

By 1913 an estimated one in nine Americans had claimed a free Coke, some 8.5 million drinks.

The word "grocer" comes from a French word meaning what?

Grossier and the Latin grossarius also gave us "gross", meaning twelve dozen.

In which city did the US stage Supermarket USA in 1957, the first American-style supermarket in a communist country?

The 10,000-square-foot exhibit in Yugoslavia stocked 4,000 items and helped spread the format worldwide.

How much did the founder of the Ohio chain that bears his surname invest to open his first store in 1883?

It was his entire life savings; he was the fifth of ten children of German immigrants.

What was Clarence Saunders' fully automated store concept of 1935, run like a giant vending machine, called?

Customers used a key to record items on punched tape, and a conveyor delivered them to the front; the war killed the first version.

How did the shopping cart's inventor persuade reluctant shoppers to try it in 1937?

Greeters explained the carts and paid men and women wheeled them through the aisles until customers copied them; Goldman became a multimillionaire.

The Albrecht brothers reportedly split Aldi in two in 1960 over a disagreement about selling what?

Theo took the north and Karl the south; the two companies still divide Germany along the so-called Aldi Equator.

Costco's hot dog and drink combo was first priced at $1.50 in which year?

Co-founder Jim Sinegal reportedly told a later CEO he would kill him if the price ever went up, and as of 2025 it had not.

In the 1960s, which trading stamp company issued more stamps every year than the US Postal Service?

Shoppers pasted them into books and redeemed them from a catalogue that was mailed out 35 million times a year.

7-Eleven took its name in 1946 from what?

Trading from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. was unheard of at the time; the company had started as an ice house in Dallas selling milk and eggs off the dock.

The Texas grocery chain H-E-B is named after the initials of which person?

Florence Butt opened the shop in her Kerrville home in 1905; her youngest son Howard Edward Butt took over in 1919 and named the company after himself.

Otto Rohwedder's bread-slicing machine was first put to use in 1928 by a bakery in which state?

The Chillicothe Baking Company sold the first sliced loaves on 7 July 1928; within five years most American bread was sold sliced.

In 1943, US officials briefly banned which everyday grocery item as a wartime conservation measure?

The ban was meant to save wax paper and steel for slicing blades; public outrage got it lifted within two months.

The one-piece plastic shopping bag was patented in 1965 by Celloplast, a company from which country?

Engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin's design folded, welded and die-cut a flat plastic tube; it was meant to be reused many times, not thrown away.

Who invented the machine that makes flat-bottomed brown paper grocery bags, in 1868?

She had to win a patent lawsuit against a man who copied her design and argued that a woman could not have understood the machinery.

The egg carton was invented in 1911 by a BC newspaper editor to settle a dispute between a farmer and whom?

Joseph Coyle of Smithers heard the two arguing about broken deliveries and designed the paper carton to end the row.

Who hosted the 1990s Lifetime revival of the game show 'Supermarket Sweep'?

The show first ran on ABC in 1965; the 2020 revival with Leslie Jones brought back the trolley dash and the giant hams.

Grocery delivery company Instacart was founded in 2012 by whom?

He was 26 and had reportedly abandoned about 20 earlier startup ideas before landing on grocery delivery.

On produce stickers, a four-digit PLU code prefixed with which digit shows the fruit is organic?

The codes are assigned by the International Federation for Produce Standards; conventional produce gets numbers in the 3000s and 4000s.

Woodland and Silver's 1952 barcode patent extended which system into thick and thin bars?

Woodland sketched the first version in the sand on a Miami beach, then decided it would scan better printed as a bull's-eye of concentric circles.

How is Australia's supermarket chain Woolworths related to the American F. W. Woolworth company?

The first store opened in Sydney's Imperial Arcade in 1924 as 'Woolworths Stupendous Bargain Basement', and the founders simply liked the famous name.

Migros began in 1925 with Gottlieb Duttweiler selling six basic goods from what?

The trucks carried only coffee, rice, sugar, pasta, coconut oil and soap. Migros still refuses to sell alcohol or tobacco because of Duttweiler's health concerns.

Which 1990 US law made the black-and-white calories and Daily Values panel mandatory on packaged foods?

The label itself, designed by Burkey Belser, arrived on packages in May 1994 and won a Presidential design award three years later.

Which Connecticut grocer with animatronic singing cows did the New York Times dub the 'Disneyland of Dairy Stores'?

The Norwalk original made the Guinness Book of Records for the highest sales per square foot of any single food store.

Joe Albertson opened the first Albertsons store in 1939 in which state capital?

The Idaho chain later swallowed Safeway in a 2015 merger, creating one of the largest grocers in the country.

Clarence Birdseye's company first test-sold quick-frozen foods in 1930 in stores around which Massachusetts city?

Birdseye learned fast-freezing from Inuit fishermen in Labrador; frozen peas needed a new fixture, so his firm also leased freezer cabinets to shops.

Which Wall Street financier engineered the 1926 merger that created the modern Safeway chain?

The Merrill Lynch founder bought a 322-store chain and merged it with M. B. Skaggs' stores, instantly creating the biggest grocer west of the Mississippi.

Which early King Kullen imitator, opened in New Jersey in 1933, out-earned over a hundred A&P stores in a year?

Chains such as A&P at first resisted supermarkets but the Depression forced them to build their own.

In which South London district did the UK's first supermarket, under the Premier Supermarkets brand, open?

Ex-US Navy sailor Patrick Galvani pitched the idea to Express Dairies in 1951; the store took ten times a typical shop's weekly revenue.