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Memphis is only one hour, practically due north. For weeks, they'd seen billboards and read newspaper ads about this grocery store with the funny name that promised an entirely new shopping experience, one that would, according to its owner, forever change the retail grocery business. Greg Hengler sat down with Mike Freeman near the location of that first Piggly Wiggly in downtown Memphis. Mike Freeman is the author of Clarence Saunders and the founding of Piggly Wiggly, the rise and fall of a Memphis Maverick. I took a job at a restaurant in downtown Memphis that happened to be at 79 Jefferson. And that was the first location of the Piggly Wiggly store. It was an interesting fact.
You know, I became interested in that. My employer wanted me to do some research because he was curious as well, you know, what happened in the building and such. It's important to know what Saunders did differently was, in the old days, if you went into a store to shop, you couldn't just reach out and pick out your own groceries. You had clerks do that for you. So you had to wait for them to, you tell the clerk what you want and then they would bring it to you. And Saunders thought, well, this is really slow.
This is so inefficient. And all this tied in with a brand advertised before the turn of the century. You had all these brands we still recognize. Kellogg's cereal, Van Camp, Pork and Beans. All these companies were selling their products in stores. And Saunders knew, well, you don't need a clerk to tell you what cereal you like. You like Kellogg's cereal? There it is.
You get it yourself. The most important thing to him is I could sell more groceries, less costs. I could pay fewer people. Saunders grew up from a family that was poor. In fact, there's one story that a neighbor bought Clarence a pair of shoes. And then when Saunders had money later in life, he set a check to that family for a number of years because they helped him out and he really needed it. So he knew what it was like to suffer your living hardship and he carried that with him.
That probably motivated him as much as he seemed to do something. Saunders became a traveling salesman for a wholesale company. So he would call upon grocers and Saunders developed a reputation for being a bit brash. He would go into a store and he would tell the store owner, says, you know, you would sell more vegetables if you displayed them this way. So the way you had it. And some thought, well, what does this guy know?
No, not everybody appreciated his advice. But it shows that he was already thinking about, you know, trying ways to do things have been better than before. There was a man in Memphis who built a chain of stores, Mr. Bowers stores. There were small corner grocery stores, but every Bowers store looked exactly the same as the signs in the front and the layout of the store where the groceries were placed. So each Bowers store was identical. And that was an innovation, too, if you went from one store to the other, you know exactly where to find what you wanted to buy. Because everything was in the same place, despite, you know, in different locations. And Saunders, he absorbed these ideas as a principal chain store. Everything is alike as much as it can be. So if you're comfortable with what they do, then you'll shop at chain store no matter where that location was.
So you could go into a town where you unfamiliar to you and find your favorite grocery, you know, whatever the business is or Starbucks, for that matter, and get exactly what you want. And that's the whole principle of chain store. Bowers did that before Saunders. So he clearly learned from Bowers how to manage a chain store business. The one thing that Bowers did not do was arrange things for customers to pick out themselves. So he still had clerks, and Saunders thought this was an inefficient way of doing things.
And he was kind of sarcastic. He says, you know, in a store is not very busy. The poor customer can't get the attention of a clerk because they're busy goofing off in the back room. He says if that happens, or they're so busy, like during Christmas season, you know, everyone's shopping in the store so busy they can't handle the orders properly. The arrangement of the store that Bowers and the older merchants had was as you walked up to a counter, and once you had your clerk's attention, you would rattle off what you wanted. And then he would go about the rest of the store picking out the items you wanted and bring them to the front.
And then you would transact business, then off you go. And Saunders thought, well, you know, they don't need a clerk to tell them that Campbell's soup is good, or we just put it on a shelf, they can find it themselves. He took this journey to Terre Haute, Indiana to look at a store that he was told was unique and designs differently. And he came back a bit disappointed.
It wasn't really anything special at all. And Saunders told the story off and he said on the way back, he saw this mother pig at a farm, and he saw all these piglets trying to feed off the mother pig and it reminded him of customers trying to attract an engine of a clerk. And then the idea popped in his head, he had the name, Piggly Wiggly, just from saying this pig. Okay, that's the name. And then he went about designing, well, how are we going to actually do this?
We'd have to practically rebuild the interior of a store to change its self-service. Piggly Wiggly, that was his name. And it was a very unusual name.
I think it was perfect for what he was trying to do because he was being different. And then he began writing advertisements where Piggly Wiggly became a character. Piggly Wiggly goes to town, you know, Piggly Wiggly does this. And so, you know, that's how he built his brand identity. He made a story out of an imaginary pig that went shopping.
I'll read part of one. It's Piggly Wiggly. Ain't that a funny name?
The fella that got up that name must have a screw loose somewheres. All this may be so, but the Piggly Wiggly knows its own business best, and its business will be this. To have no store clerks gab and smirk while folks are standing around 10 deep at Lady Dock. Every customer will be her own clerk, so if she wants to talk to a can of tomatoes and kill her time, all right and well.
It seems likely this will be a mighty loathsome chat. Saunders addressed customer fears. You know, it used to be if you went into certain stores in the old days, you know, the clerk might put his thumb on the scale so you'd pay extra for tomatoes or potatoes or whatever. Or they'd sell you food that was out of date. Saunders thought all that was just raw.
It was just not good business. You could sell more groceries just by being honest. He was very proud. He talked a lot about labeling prices on everything. So you walk in, you go to the can soup aisle, you know exactly what the price of that soup is. And it didn't matter what store you're in, one of the stores, they all price things about the same, and it didn't matter who you were or whether the clerk knew you or not, you got the same price.
When we come back, more of Mike Freeman telling the story of Clarence Saunders, the founder of Piggly Wiggly, here on Our American Stories. Clean water access helps kids soak up childhood. Girls can be in class instead of walking hours for water. Kids can be climbing trees and skinning knees instead of being sick with waterborne diseases. Sponsor a child at worldvision.org slash water for kids and help ensure access to life-changing essentials like clean water.
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Let's continue with Mike. He knew he was taking a less profit. He probably had people in the grocery business say, well, you can't make any money. You're not selling high enough.
You're not making enough profit. But he was looking up volume. You know, the more stores you open, the more volume you have. You know, one of the benefits of self-service is you are selling more goods per day. And that helps eliminate the problem of spoiled food or expired food. And Saunders was aware of that. And he would advertise to people and say, this is what I'm doing.
I'm going to treat you fair. I mean, now you can't imagine going in the store, not having a label on it. So this is 32 cents or whatever. Can't imagine it. But before, you know, the 20th century, that was commonplace. Once you label everything, then no grocery store can hide. His competitors are thinking, oh, you know, they have to do something different. You know, he proved right there that first year that he had about eight or nine stores in Memphis and Bowers had over 40. And he outsold the Bowers stores simply because he made it easier for people to shop.
And they just started swarming into this, into the big wiglets. You know, he's one of those rare individuals that has an idea that work. And it transformed part of our society. I don't say he's as great as Henry Ford, but, you know, Ford decided, well, why? Why can't we put an engine in this little carriage and then hook it up to some wheels? And then we don't need a horse and bug anymore. We have a car change the world. Now, Saunders isn't of that level of success, but I think he had the same mind where he thought, well, let's do something a little different here.
You know, the old ways are, eh, you can do a little faster, a little bit better than that. And then that's what Piggly Wiggly was. Grocery store is a version of the Model T. As interesting as the next year, he started a franchise and he actually filed for several patents, you know, several patents. But he started selling the idea that, well, you guys down in Arkansas and Mississippi, you can build a thingy with it.
There's towns all over the South that are large enough to support a couple of military stores. And then that proceeded very rapidly, selling franchises all over the place. You could argue that the founder of Walmart did virtually the same thing. He put a Walmart in medium sized towns, you know, but town doesn't have a Walmart and it's kind of not a town. But having a store like that in your community, hiring the local folks to work in the store, probably manage the store, it built a loyalty for that brand that for Walmart still exists. The difference between Walden and Saunders is Walden never lost his business.
He held on to it. Where I think Saunders had a lot of the same attitudes, same personality in some way. He wanted to be that champion, but in the end, he didn't keep that business long enough. Right now, most people don't know who Saunders is. Saunders achieved a level of celebrity and wealth that most people only dream up. He's most famous for the Pink Palace is a building. I don't know how many square feet it is.
Well, they've added on to it, but the majority of that 36,000 square feet is what he built. And it was to have a swimming pool and have everything a rich person would walk. Saunders tried to outsmart traders of Wall Street, and to explain it simply, he didn't realize they wrote the rules of trade. There was no governing agency overseeing financial trade that we have now. It was whatever certain people call Wall Street decided to do is what was done.
They made the rules among themselves. I have trouble sometimes describing a short sale. It's just a stock maneuver where different people in the financial business spread rumors that a company's in trouble. That the stock's not worth what it's listing at now.
And Saunders thought that was horrible. Piggly Wiggly had over expanded and there was a franchise or two that had gone bankrupt. And that was all the trigger that these short sellers made it. And he started this campaign as take the shares out of the hands of these Wall Street thieves or wolves. And he started a buying campaign in Memphis, you know, save Piggly Wiggly from menthols.
Because most people in Memphis or, you know, any city outside of New York probably thought about Wall Street saying it was speed debt and it was sort of a this kind of a villainous place. And he was playing on that, you know, don't let these thieves take our Piggly Wiggly away from us. So everyone invested in Saunders scheme to buy all the shares, hold them. And they pushed these these traders into a panic because whatever they borrow, they have to pay. And if he's buying all the shares that come to him, you repay what they owe him.
I mean, he was trying to trap them. And the board of directors of the Stock Exchange in New York kept Saunders from doing it. They let the traders off the hook. They could change the rules. See, there's no government agency overseeing stock trading.
Whatever the board of directors thought was legal was was illegal. And especially if they had friends who got caught up in the scheme were begging, you know, don't let us die out here. That's like, well, we'll let Saunders die. You know, they don't know him. They don't care about him. He's not part of their social group or anything like that at all. It's just some hillbilly from Tennessee who thought he knew what he was doing. They just, you know, interpreted rules to let him die. He had borrowed all that money instead of gaining what he thought would be hundreds of millions of dollars. He had nothing. You know, 12 million is a lot of money today to lose.
Imagine what it was like 1923. What Saunders had done, and there were people that really liked him because he was, you know, coming very famous, was that he had begged Memphians to pool together money, pay off this debt so that Wiggly could get back to normal, operate under his leadership. And people did. They had rallies or save Piggly Wiggly from Memphis. That was the can made out for Saunders. He was careful to say, save Piggly Wiggly from Memphis.
And he had a point there, too. I mean, you know, there's a lot of jobs in Memphis now because of this store, this business. And then he made the dumb mistake of putting money into this, what we now know as the pig palace, which is an extravagant home. And people invested in Piggly Wiggly must have been shocked. What in the world are you doing? We're taking time away from our business, spending our money, bail you out, and you're building this stupid house.
You don't have time for that anymore. How did they find out about it? Well, a workman had been injured and the newspaper published a story.
Holy cow. You know, they couldn't believe it. It was this terrible mistake he made.
And then the costing. Well, I mean, he tried again to make money and he did. But I mean, he's still famous for what?
Piggly Wiggly. And he lost the only area in this company for six years. I guess the story is Markle in itself was that we started with one store. Six years later, he had a thousand. I mean, you know, he had some special chain, but I mean, he was successful. He did build something that was unique.
He just didn't hold on to it. And he would be Sam Walton today or his memory would be as big as Sam Walton if he had just held on to Piggly Wiggly like Walton held on to Wal-Mart. The most fitting memorial to him is the ordinary self-service store. Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart in 1962. By the end of his life in 1992, Walton owned the largest retail merchandising company in the world. In his autobiography, Sam Walton Made in America, he credited the enormous success of his retail stores to the principle of self-service. His brief description of the benefits that self-service gave to him and his desire to pass on the savings to his customers seemed to be a near match to Sonder's own words two generations before.
During the past 25 years, supermarkets and large merchandise stores have become popular in nearly every country in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa. In an odd way, Clarence Sonder's prophetic slogan for Piggly Wiggly all over the world has come true. And great job on the piece, as always, by Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Mike Freeman, who wrote the book, Clarence Saunders and the Founding of Piggly Wiggly.
And what a story. And that he started the idea of pricing and transparency and volume so that we could lower profits on each individual item, but make up for that with volume. And that is indeed what Sam Walton did. There's no doubt that Sam took a lot of the ideas of Piggly Wiggly and scaled them to a much larger operation. The story of Piggly Wiggly, the story of Clarence Saunders, here on Our American Story. The Unshakeables podcast is kicking off season two with an episode you won't want to miss. Joined host Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business, as he welcomes a very special guest, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. Hear about the challenges facing small businesses and some of the uh-oh moments Jamie has overcome.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC.
Copyright 2025. JPMorgan Chase & Co. CBS Monday, February 24th. Introducing the new daytime drama, Beyond the Gates. Welcome to Fairmont Crest Estates, where the wealthy and glamorous Dupree family rules the community with poise and sophistication.
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