Supermarket

Strictly speaking, a supermarket is larger and has a wider selection than earlier grocery stores, but is smaller and more limited in the range of merchandise than a hypermarket or big-box market.

Shelf space is also reserved for canned and packaged goods and for various non-food items such as kitchenware, household cleaners, pharmacy products and pet supplies.

Supermarkets typically are chain stores, supplied by the distribution centers of their parent companies, thus increasing opportunities for economies of scale.

Certain products (typically staple foods such as bread, milk and sugar) are very occasionally sold as loss leaders so as to attract shoppers to their store.

He founded the Astor Market in 1915, investing $750,000 of his fortune into a 165′ by 125′ (50×38-metre) corner of 95th and Broadway, Manhattan, creating, in effect, an open-air mini-mall that sold meat, fruit, produce and flowers.

[17] The expectation was that customers would come from great distances ("miles around"), but in the end, even attracting people from ten blocks away was difficult, and the market folded in 1917.

[21][22] This was a grocery store which combined several departments under one roof, but generally maintained the traditional system of clerks pulling products from shelves on request.

The general trend since then has been to stock shelves at night so that customers, the following day, can obtain their own goods and bring them to the front of the store to pay for them.

[31] They determined that the first true supermarket in the United States was opened by a former Kroger employee, Michael J. Cullen, on 4 August 1930, inside a 6,000-square-foot (560 m2) former garage in Jamaica, Queens in New York City.

[31] Moreover, the supermarket format as pioneered by King Kullen was not only cheap, but convenient, in how it combined so many different departments under one roof which had formerly required trips to separate stores.

[23] Other established American grocery chains in the 1930s, such as Kroger and Safeway Inc. at first resisted Cullen's ideas, but were eventually forced to build their own supermarkets as the economy sank into the Great Depression.

One of King Kullen's earliest imitators, Big Bear, opened its first supermarket in 1933 in New Jersey and collected more revenue in one year than over a hundred A&P stores.

The idea of "monopsony", proposed by Cambridge economist Joan Robinson in 1933, that a single buyer could outmaneuver a market of multiple sellers, became a strong anti-chain rhetorical device.

With public backlash came political pressure to even the playing field for smaller vendors lacking the luxury of economies of scale.

[39] Supermarkets rapidly proliferated across both Canada and the United States with the growth of automobile ownership and suburban development after World War II.

Kroger is the most nationally oriented supermarket chain in the United States, but it has preserved most of its regional brands, including Ralphs, City Market, King Soopers, Fry's, Smith's, and QFC.

[40] Just like the American consumers who had entered the first supermarkets two decades earlier, conference attendees, local Italian visitors, and the international news media were all astonished, bewildered, and stunned by the "mountains of food".

[40] In 1957, the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Association of Food Chains orchestrated an even grander presentation, Supermarket USA, at the Zagreb International Trade Fair in what was then part of Yugoslavia.

[43] In 1951, ex-US Navy sailor Patrick Galvani, son-in-law of Express Dairies chairman, made a pitch to the board to open a chain of supermarkets across the country.

These typically enable the cardholder to receive special members-only discounts on certain items when the credit card-like device is scanned at the checkout.

[46] In the 21st century, traditional supermarkets in many countries face intense competition from discounters such as Wal-Mart, Aldi and Lidl, which typically is non-union and operates with better buying power.

Micro-fulfillment centers (MFC) are relatively small warehouses with sophisticated automated rack-and-tote systems which prepare orders for pickup and delivery.

[54] Supermarkets are investing in micro-fulfillment centers with the hope that automation can help reduce the costs of online commerce and e-commerce by shortening the distances from store to home and speeding up deliveries.

As a response to the growing concern on the heavy use of petroleum-based plastics for food packaging, so-called "zero waste" and "plastic-free" supermarkets and groceries are on the rise.

[60][61][62] Beginning in the 1990s, the food sector in developing countries has rapidly transformed, particularly in Latin America, South-East Asia, India, China and South Africa.

Each section has different floor coverings, style, lighting and sometimes even individual services counters to allow shoppers to feel as if there are a number of markets within this one supermarket.

[70] However, other researchers have argued that consumers moving in a clockwise direction can form better mental maps of the store leading to higher sales in turn.

The layout of a supermarket is designed to create a high degree of convenience to the consumer to make the shopping experience pleasant and increase customer spending.

This suggests that supermarket marketers should use this theory to their advantage by placing their temporary displays of products on the right-hand side to entice you to make an unplanned purchase.

[70] The large scale of supermarkets, while often improving cost and efficiency for customers, can place significant economic pressure on suppliers and smaller shopkeepers.