Once upon a time, American women went to the butcher, the baker, and the grocer to gather ingredients for supper. And the shops weren’t necessarily all on the same street. And the women had to be waited on one by one. The whole process took hours.

Then around 1916, a Piggly Wiggly opened in Memphis, Tennessee, on the premise that customers would save money if they wandered the aisles and filled their baskets themselves. By 1930, Andrew Cullen opened the first true supermarket in Queens, New York, offering low prices to a nation gripped by the Great Depression. The concept launched a whole new business of food packaging and marketing.

This new market concept certainly liberated women from spending all day food shopping. And who doesn’t like clean, well-lit aisles with an eye-popping variety of products to