Stuffed and Starved The Hidden Battle for the World Food System RAJ PATEL ~ MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING • BROOKLYN , NEW YORK 8 Checking out of Supermarkets Little Jack Horner Sat in a corner, Eating a mincemeat pie. He stuck in his thumb And pulled out a plum, And said, 'What a good boy am I!' Traditional Grace to Be Said at the Supermarket That God of ours, the Great Geometer Does something for us here, where He hath put (If you want to put it that way) things in shape, Compressing the little lambs in orderly cubes, Making the roast a decent cylinder, Faring the ellipsoid of a ham, Getting the luncheon meat anonymous In squares and oblongs with the edges beveled Or rounded (streamlined, maybe, for greater speed). Praise Him, He hath conferred aesthetic distance Upon our appetites, and on the bloody Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need, Imposed significant form. Through Him the brutes Enter the pure Eucljdean kingdom of number, Free of their bulging and blood-swollen lives Stuffed and Starved Checking out of Supermarkets 217 216 They come to us holy, in cellophane was a challenge, particularly since profit margins were already Transparencies, in the mystical body, slim- one way to manage the cost/price squeeze was to take That we may look unflinchingly on death advantage of ~conomies of scale. The bigger the firm, the greater its As the greatest good, like a philosopher should. power to negotiate down the price it pays per unit. But there were Howard Nemerov1 no corporations dealing exclusively in food retailing that were large enough to do this. Size was the privilege of manufacturing and shipping corporations. The giants of the late nineteenth- and early The Self-Serving Store twentieth-century agricultural corporate world were principally the The highest temple of the modern food system is the supermarket. processors and conveyors of food, not its retailers. One shipping The supermarket chain is an empire of logistics, one that governs company, the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (better known and regulates the s"!-aller fiefdoms within the food industry, such as today as A&P), realized that there was money to be made not only the commission agent's rule over the grower, or the distributor's in trading food, but it selling it to the consumer. It established an clutch on the agent. Through its decisions, and through its close archipelago of grocery stores, which it supplied using the country's supervision of each step in a product chain, supermarket buying growing road and rail infrastructure, taking advantage of relatively desks can fire the poorest farm workers in South Africa, flip the low transport costs and the savings accrued from being able to sell fates of coffee growers in Guatemala or tweak the output of paddy its own products direct to the retailer. A&P's logistical feats laid the foundatio ns for what we recognize today as the modern super­ terraces in Thailand. Supermarkets are patented inventions and, like all innova- market: a large company, able to bargain down supplier prices, able tions, they responded to a specific need at the time and place of to ensure that shelves are never empty, specializing in logistics and their conception. That place was the early twentieth-century marketing. Once goods reached the A&P grocery store, though, the United States, a time and place of unrivalled plenty. The wheels retail experience was essentially the same. The clerk was the front of American industry were turning fast, and manufactured goods line between the buyer and their purchases. Customers still had to were being pumped out in ever-greater quantities, packaged and ask for what they wanted, and they were kept well away from stuck on shelves for the growing urban population. There was a Products until they'd committed to buy them. All this was about to change. worry among manufacturers that, in fact, too much was being produced and that consumers couldn't afford to make purchases The whole business of agriculture was in flux in post-Civil War · Uel fast enough to soak up the flood of goods. There was a para America, and nowhere was the boom louder than in California. The concern that even if consumers could afford to buy the goods on Gold Rush had given way to agriculture, and California's fortunes "d 't strictlY d :: being earned by landlords, horticulturalists, researchers, the shelves, they wouldn't want to, because they 1 n need them. The timeless technique for persuading to ers, railroad magnates, the occasional immigrant with seeds consumer~h pnce. buy more of something was and remains this: reduce .t e pnce. 5 :a dream, corporations with access to water, and banks with For the early twentieth-century grocery industry, cutung t to fund it all. The food production industry was being turned Checking out of Supermarkets 219 Stuffed and Starved 218 own words, as he used in US . Patent 1,242,872 for the 'Self-Serving on its head, and not only in the fields. Experiments with new ideas store'. were being conducted at the retail end of the chain. Albert and Hugh Gerrard, for instance, had started tinkering with the notion The object of my said invention is to provide a store that, rather than have grocery clerks do it for them, consumers equipment by which the customer will be enabled to serve themselves might pick their own groceries. This, certainly, would himself and, in so doing, will be required to review the persuade people to buy more, and at less cost to the retailer. When entire assortment of goods carried in stock, conveniently encouraged to help ourselves, to graze ad libitum, people tend to and attractively displayed, and after selecting the list of consume more, to pick things off shelves with an abandon seldom goods desired, will be required to pass a checking and felt if there's an intermediary. For this to work, though, consumers paying station at which the goods selected may be billed, needed to know where to look for their groceries. So, primarily as a packed, and settled for before retiring from the store, thus marketing gimmick, the Gerrards opened grocery stores that relieving the store of a large proportion of the usual stocked items in the most logical way they could conceive - in incidental expenses, or overhead charges, required to 14 4 alphabetical order. The Alpha Beta chain of stores had, by 19 , operate it .. embraced a self-service format, allowing customers to pick food The new store combined the idea of getting consumers to shop for from open shelves. From their first store in Pomona, they had themselves (and so reducing staffing costs) with the means for established a small chain in California, and were fairly successful. While the self-service format was being pioneered in the west, it took a combination of a savvy Virginian working in Tennessee and a ~ series of geopolitical events to usher in the real retail revolution. In 191.6, a confluence of two events transformed the United States' grocery business. The first was when the US joined the First World ! War. With that entry, food prices climbed by 19 per cent. (In 19!7. there were to be food riots in protest at the price rises in New York, I t·~!! Boston and Philadelphia.) 2 More than ever, grocers felt the pressure ·§ to cut costs, since food buyers were prepared to go to great lengths =: to· find cheaper food. Cutting costs through scale was one option, =!~"' f1 Jly but on u September 1916/ local retailer Clarence saunders na turned retailing on its head with a shock far more profound than the . f" cu;ng piggiY u N .1 I US entry mto the War. Saunders opened the 1rst , Wiggly' in Memphis, Tennessee. In it, he codified the keY . h centurY·reta~t revolution that was to reverberate through the twenuet r and n all turns on transforming the relationship between the hiS hebu~e. 1s 1 n the seller in a way that cut retail costs to the bone. Here Source: US Patent Office. Stuffed and Starved 220 t . SAUUUS. 11\f $(h116 $1011 . making sure that they were exposed to everything for sale (thus AtfU Utt.. f ll.l l en. lt1 U1t. t,M9,872. Pats ted Oct. 9, 1917. maximizing potential revenue).5 The plan view from Saunders' •nm ..... utt patent shows how the internal geography of the store balanced Ul 'Q stock-control with the communicative architecture of what was ultimately, the first consumption factory. You begin at the entrance' you walk through a turnstile, pkk up your basket, follow the m,; of products back and forth until you arrive at the till, at which point you pay. There's only one path to follow, there's no one to talk to and the store is designed first and foremost to get you to put as mud~ as you can into your trolley in as litde time and with as low a cost to the store as possible. In it, shoppers resembled nothing so much as rats in a maze. That said, some consumers didn't quite understand the system. ~ · ~ In Australia, supermarket promoters hired instructors, who taught ~ adults and children, men and women, how to push carts down the aisles. And in US stores today, one can find child-sized carts with long poles attached. While intended to help parents better find ~ their children in the aisles, the mini-carts serve an educational purpose. The flag proclaims it quite clearly: 'Customer in 6 trainingFor Saunders,'.