I am thoughtful—full of thoughts, all the time, inescapably, exhaustingly. But I am also mindless—acting in accordance with default settings I neither understand nor examine. To a degree I don’t want to accept, I am what we have long claimed lemmings to be. Forces beyond my comprehension have led me and my fellow lemmings to a precipice, and I fear the shove is coming. The lemmings myth doesn’t last because it helps us to understand lemmings. It lasts because it helps us to understand ourselves.
Penguins of Madagascar is an exceptionally silly movie. But how else can we confront the absurdities of the Anthropocene? I stand by my Provocative Opinion, and give the opening sequence of Penguins of Madagascar four and a half stars.
PIGGLY WIGGLY
IN 1920, according to census records, my great-grandfather Roy worked at a grocery store in a tiny town in western Tennessee. Like all U.S. grocery stores at the beginning of the twentieth century, this one was full-service: You walked in with a list of items you needed, and then the grocer—perhaps my great-grandfather—would gather those items. The grocer would weigh the flour or cornmeal or butter or tomatoes, and then wrap everything up for you. My great-grandfather’s store probably also allowed customers to purchase food on credit, a common practice at the time. The customer would then, usually, pay back their grocery bill over time.
That job was supposed to be my great-grandfather’s path out of poverty, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead, the store closed, thanks in part to the self-service grocery store revolution launched by Clarence Saunders, which reshaped the way Americans shopped and cooked and ate and lived. Saunders was a self-educated child of impoverished sharecroppers. Eventually, he found his way into the grocery business in Memphis, Tennessee, about a hundred miles southwest from my great-grandfather’s store. Saunders was thirty-five when he developed a concept for a grocery store that would have no counters, but instead a labyrinth of aisles that customers would walk themselves, choosing their own food and placing it in their own shopping baskets.
Prices at Saunders’s self-service grocery would be lower, because his stores would employ fewer clerks and also because he would not offer customers credit, instead expecting immediate payment. The prices would also be clear and transparent—for the first time, every item in a grocery store would be marked with a price so customers would no longer fear being shortchanged by unscrupulous grocers. Saunders called his store Piggly Wiggly.
Why? Nobody knows. When asked where the name came from, Saunders once answered that it arrived “from out of chaos and in direct contact with an individual’s mind,” which gives you a sense of the kind of guy he was. But usually, when Saunders was asked why anyone would call a grocery store Piggly Wiggly, he would answer, “So people will ask that very question.”
The first Piggly Wiggly opened in Memphis in 1916. It was so successful that the second Piggly Wiggly opened three weeks later. Two months after that, another opened. Saunders insisted on calling it “Piggly Wiggly the Third” to lend his stores the “royal dignity they are due.” He began attaching a catchphrase to his storefront signs: “Piggly Wiggly: All Around the World.” At the time, the stores were barely all around Memphis, but Saunders’s prophecies came true: Within a year, there were 353 Piggly Wigglies around the United States, and today, Saunders’s concept of self-service aisles really has spread all around the world.
In newspaper advertisements, Saunders wrote of his self-service concept in nearly messianic terms. “One day Memphis shall be proud of Piggly Wiggly,” one ad read. “And it shall be said by all men that the Piggly Wigglies shall multiply and replenish the Earth with more and cleaner things to eat.” Another time he wrote, “The mighty pulse of the throbbing today makes new things out of old and new things where was nothing before.” Basically, Saunders spoke of Piggly Wiggly as today’s Silicon Valley executives talk of their companies: We’re not just making money here. We are replenishing the earth.
Piggly Wiggly and the self-service grocery stores that followed did bring down prices, which meant there was more to eat. They also changed the kinds of foods that were readily available—to save costs and limit spoilage, Piggly Wiggly stocked less fresh produce than traditional grocery stores. Prepackaged, processed foods became more popular and less expensive, which altered American diets. Brand recognition also became extremely important, because food companies had to appeal directly to shoppers, which led to the growth of consumer-oriented food advertising on radio and in newspapers. National brands like Campbell Soup and OREO cookies exploded in popularity; by 1920, Campbell was the nation’s top soup brand and OREO the top cookie brand—which they still are today.
Self-service grocery stores also fueled the rise of many other processed food brands. Wonder Bread. MoonPies. Hostess CupCakes. Birds Eye frozen vegetables. Wheaties cereal. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. French’s mustard. Klondike bars. Velveeta cheese. All of these brands, and many more, appeared in the United States within a decade of the first Piggly Wiggly opening. Clarence Saunders understood the new intersections between mass media and brand awareness better than almost anyone at the time. In fact, during the early 1920s, Piggly Wiggly was the single largest newspaper advertiser in the United States.
Keeping prices low and employing fewer clerks also meant many people who worked at traditional grocery stores lost their jobs, including my great-grandfather. There’s nothing new about our fear that automation and increased efficiency will deprive humans of work. In one newspaper ad, Saunders imagined a woman torn between her longtime relationship with her friendly grocer and the low, low prices at Piggly Wiggly. The story concluded with Saunders appealing to a tradition even older than the full-service grocer. The woman in his ad mused, “Now away back many years, there had been a Dutch grandmother of mine who had been thrifty. The spirit of that old grandmother asserted itself just then within me and said, ‘Business is business and charity and alms are another.’” Whereupon our shopper saw the light and converted to Piggly Wiggly.
By 1922, there were more than a thousand Piggly Wiggly stores around the U.S., and shares in the company were listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Saunders was building a thirty-six-thousand-square-foot mansion in Memphis and had endowed the school now known as Rhodes College. But the good times would not last. After a few Piggly Wiggly stores in the Northeast failed, investors began shorting the stock—betting that its price would fall. Saunders responded by trying to buy up all the available shares of Piggly Wiggly using borrowed money, but the gambit failed spectacularly. Saunders lost control of Piggly Wiggly and went bankrupt.
His vitriol at Wall Street short sellers presaged contemporary corporate titans just as his reliance on big advertising and hyperefficiency did. Saunders was by many accounts a bully—verbally abusive, cruel, and profoundly convinced of his own genius. After losing control of the company, he wrote, “They have it all, everything I built, the greatest stores of their kind in the world, but they didn’t get the man that was father to the idea. They have the body of Piggly Wiggly but they didn’t get the soul.” Saunders quickly developed a new concept for a grocery store. This one would have aisles and self-service but also clerks in the meat department and the bakery. Essentially, he invented the supermarket model that would reign into the twenty-first century.