American Scientist the Magazine of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society

A reprint from American Scientist the magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society This reprint is provided for personal and noncommercial use. For any other use, please send a request to Permissions, American Scientist, P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC, 27709, U.S.A., or by electronic mail to [email protected]. ©Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society and other rightsholders Engineering Shopping by Design Henry Petroski n t he ear l y fal l of 1999, four Seattle on the sidewalk a knotted handkerchief Iinventors were awarded a U.S. patent containing a note and money. Thus I be- (No. 5,960,411) for a “Method and Sys- Supermarkets, like came a surrogate shopper and customer tem for Placing a Purchase Order via at a store in which a clerk provided the a Communications Network,” better other inventions, interface with the merchandise. know as Amazon.com’s trademarked Entering such a store, the customer “1-Click” shopping. By this scheme, a didn’t just happen; would approach the counter (or wait customer previously registered can or- for a clerk to become available) and der a book or anything else offered on they were designed, place an order, either verbally or, as was Amazon’s Web site by a single mouse often the case for boys running errands, click. Amazon.com’s arch World Wide developed—and in the form of a note or list. While the Web rival, Barnesandnoble.com, had customer waited, the clerk would move a similar feature, designated Express patented behind the counter and throughout the Lane, and within weeks of the patent’s store, select the items on the list—some issuance, Amazon sued Barnes & No- from shelves so high that long-handled ble for infringement. An injunction grasping devices had to be used—and was granted by a Seattle court in early bring them back to the counter to be tal- December, and Barnes & Noble imme- out having to invest in costly develop- lied and bagged or boxed. The process diately appealed. Within a week, the ment of their own. Barnesandnoble.com might be expedited by the customer Court of Appeals upheld the judgment eventually got around Amazon’s 1-click calling or sending in the order before- in favor of Amazon, and Express Lane patent by requiring customers to add hand, or by the order being handled by had to be closed. Just before Christmas, a second, confirmational click, but the a delivery boy on a bike, but otherwise Barnesandnoble.com customers had no general debate over the matter of soft- it did not vary greatly. The alternative to choice but to use the Web merchant’s ware patents has continued and can be the clerk-tended grocery was, of course, metaphorical shopping cart and input expected to do so for some time. the self-service supermarket, but young credit card and shipping data as if they errand boys were not always trusted were at the checkout counter of a con- No-Click Shopping to make important selections among ventional store. Debates about patents are nothing new. A&P’s grades of coffee and degrees of The Amazon.com patent and its con- Just as the shopping cart icon on Inter- grinding. Besides, the supermarket was sequences are quite controversial, and net retail sites connects them metaphor- blocks away. they prompted considerable discussion ically to the bricks-and-mortar stores on the Web and elsewhere about soft- after which they are ultimately mod- Inventing Self-Service ware patenting generally. One side of the eled, so does the use of patents to gain The self-service supermarket may have argument holds that Amazon benefited business advantage continue a long tra- provided an alternative shopping ex- greatly from the open and free circula- dition of battles over intellectual prop- perience at mid-century, but that was tion of software and programming ideas erty. A century or so ago, long before not the case just decades earlier. Like and practices that prevailed in the 1990s, there were computers, shopping was all things and systems that do not ex- and could not have prospered had other done quite differently than it is today. ist in nature, it had first to be invented Internet companies secured protective Even a half-century ago, when I was and designed, then developed, and fi- patents the way Amazon had. The other growing up in Brooklyn, I recall it be- nally promoted. Inventions that prog- side, represented by Jeff Bezos, Ama- ing a different experience. My family ress through successful adoption earn zon’s founder and one of the inventors lived on a block occupied by a mix of the name innovations. What inspired of 1-click shopping, contends that with- houses, duplexes and rows of attached and drove the innovation of the self- out patent protection competitors can three-story apartment buildings, from service store were the limitations and just copy Amazon’s innovations with- the top floors of which an old woman frustrations of shopping the old way. might stick her head out the window, Just about everyone could articulate Henry Petroski is Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor call down to a passing boy and ask him the shortcomings, or at least instantly of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at to go to the corner grocery store for her. recognize them as soon as they were Duke University. Address: Box 90287, Durham, On those occasions when I was that boy, pointed out, but it took an inventor to NC 27708-0287 the woman would throw down to me do something about them. www.americanscientist.org © 2005 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproduction 2005 November–December 491 with permission only. Contact [email protected]. Clarence Saunders patented the concept of the supermarket in 1917. The first actual store, shown here, was built in 1916 in Memphis. Saunders eventually named this and his other chain stores Piggly Wiggly. (Photograph from the Library of Congress.) Clarence Saunders, who left school tomers were constrained to move on in just a short time of operation of his at age 14 to work as a clerk in a general a prescribed path and were thus “re- store, he could state in his patent (No. store, was to be such an inventor. He quired to review the entire assortment 1,242,872), issued in 1917 for a “self- eventually became a wholesale grocery of goods carried in stock,” which were serving store,” that: salesman in Memphis, Tennessee, and displayed on shelves and in appropri- he decried the lack of efficiency and ate cabinets, including a glass-doored In actual operation it has been economy that he had observed in retail refrigerator for perishables; and (3) a found that the usual margin of grocery stores, much of it having to do rear “storage or stock room.” Above profit on the sale of goods al- with high overhead and large credit the shelving and cabinet units of the lowed for the successful opera- losses. Among the principal inefficien- sales department were galleries, from tion of what are known as “cash cies was the employment of clerks to which a “floor-walker” or other em- groceries” may be reduced by retrieve items, and Saunders devised ployee could direct and instruct cus- more than half without reducing a system in which the customer would tomers in the new method of shop- the measure of profits. It has also do that directly. Saunders’s concept ping, monitor the shelves and cabinets been demonstrated that the sales was to divide a store’s floor plan into for need of replenishment, and gener- capacity of a store, equipped in three distinct areas: (1) a front “lobby ally supervise the activity below—all accordance with my invention (forming an entrance and exit room),” without getting in the way of those and operating in accordance with what today we might call the checkout negotiating the maze and selecting and my system, is increased several area, where only relatively few clerks purchasing goods. times, i.e., the sales of a store thus were needed to operate the cash reg- In 1916, Saunders opened his first equipped have exceeded, by three ister and pack orders; (2) a “sales de- store operating under the new prin- or four times, the amount of sales partment,” which was entered through ciple at 79 Jefferson Street in Memphis. that it would be possible to han- one gate (later, a turnstile) and exited He filed a patent application shortly dle in the same store waited upon through another, and about which cus- thereafter. With the experience gained by clerks in the usual way. © 2005 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproduction 492 American Scientist, Volume 93 with permission only. Contact [email protected]. Patent 1,242,872 described a “self-serving store” that could operate successfully at half the profit margin when compared to the conventional clerk-service store of the time. In other words, the self-service store reluctant to explain” his choice’s ori- system could operate with lower prices, gin. According to one story about it, which would attract more customers, Saunders “once saw from a train sever- which in turn would provide a higher al piglets trying to get under a fence.” overall profit. Although Saunders’s jus- Since a contemporary dictionary de- tification for his invention was largely fined “piggy-wiggy” as a “child’s rim- its economic advantage to the store ing extension of piggy, used playfully owner, the self-service concept also of- in speaking of or to a child,” the con- fered advantages to the customer, even strained movement through the sales though she or he was constrained to department may have evoked the rec- traverse the “sales department” in a ollection and hence the name.

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