Piggly Wiggly Essay

In 2016, there were 38,441 U.S. Supermarkets, or self-service grocery stores with over $2MM in annual revenue (Source). The dominating supermarket companies are Kroger and Albertsons’ with $103B and $58B in annual revenue respectively, but no one firm maintains a dominant market share (Source). With Americans tending to make 1.6 trips to the grocery store on average per week, there is great opportunity for innovation in this space to impact our lives in significant ways (source). Furthermore, the grocery market size has become larger with the expenditure at food stores surpassing $436B in 2013, compared to $272B only 20 years prior in 1993, as shown by my graph in Figure A.
While amounting to about $7B in 2015, online grocery sales are expected

Rather than having the clerk pick out the items and act as a concierge, Piggly Wiggly introduced the concept of self-service (source). Customers would enter the store and choose the items they wanted themselves, and this enabled the creation of countless other innovations including shopping baskets (created in 1937), price-marked items, and the supermarket franchise model (source). From this point forward, the supermarket industry began blooming and expanding rapidly throughout the

Walmart began in discount retailing and after establishing state-of-the-art distribution channels, pivoted into grocery very effectively later. It is now the largest food retailer by volume sold, with over 100 supercenters being opened every year (source). Walmart is known for its low prices, but cost is no longer enough of a differentiator for competitors, since it is likely to start a price war in an industry where profits are already so marginal. In this cutthroat environment, alternative formats and specialty stores have been able to