Supermarket
A supermarket is a store that sells a wide variety of goods including food and alcohol, medicine, clothes, and other household products that are consumed regularly. It is often part of a chain that owns or controls (sometimes by franchise) other supermarkets located in the same or other towns; this increases the opportunities for economies of scale.
Supermarkets usually offer products at low prices by reducing margins. To maintain a profit supermarkets attempt to make up for the low margins with a high volume of sales. Customers usually shop be putting their products into trolleys (shopping carts) or baskets (self-service) and pay for the products at the check-out. At present, many supermarket chains are trying to reduce labour costs (and thus margins) further by shifting to self-service check-out machines, where a group of four or five machines is supervised by a single assistant.
A larger full-service supermarket combined with a department store is known as a hypermarket. Other services that supermarkets may have include cafés, creches, photo development, pharmacies, and/or petrol stations.
History
Early retailers did not trust their customers. In many stores, all products had to be fetched by an assistant from high shelves on one side of a counter while the customer stood on the other side and pointed to what they wanted. This was obviously labour-intensive and quite expensive.
The concept of a self-service grocery store was developed by Clarence Saunders and his Piggly Wiggly stores, and A&P was the most successful of the early chains, having become common in American cities in the 1920s. The general trend in retail since then has been to stack shelves at night and let the customer get their own goods and bring them to the front of the store to pay for them. Although there is a higher risk of shoplifting, the costs of appropriate security measures will be ideally outweighed by the economies of scale and reduced labour costs.
The first true supermarket was opened by ex-Kroger employee Michael J. Cullen, in 1930 in a 6,000 square foot (560 m²) former garage in Jamaica, Queens, New York. The store, titled King Kullen, following King Kong, operated under the slogan "Pile it high. Sell it low." When Cullen died in 1936, there were fifteen stores in operation.
Supermarkets proliferated along with suburban areas after World War II. Supermarkets in the USA are now often co-located with department stores in strip malls and are generally regional rather than national. Kroger is probably the closest thing in the U.S. to a national chain but has preserved most of its regional brands like Ralphs.
It was formerly common for supermarkets to give trading stamps.
In Britain, Denmark and other European countries the proliferation of out-of-town supermarkets has been blamed for the disappearance of smaller, local grocery stores and for increased dependency on the motor car.
Typical supermarket merchandise
Supermarkets typically sell many different types of items, such as:
- Alcoholic products
- Electrical items
- Personal financial products (mortgages, credit cards, savings accounts etc.
- Pet foods and products
- Car care products
- Baby foods and products
- Beauty products (cosmetics)
- Newspapers, Books and magazines
- Luggage
- DVDs, CDs and Videos
- Breakfast cereals
- Confectionery
- Clothing and footwear
- Dairy products
- Diet foods
- Medicines and first aid items (mostly over-the-counter, some supermarkets have pharmacies)
- Feminine hygiene products, like maxi pads, tampons, and pantyliners
- Flowers
- Frozen foods
- Fruit and vegetables
- Greeting cards
- Housecleaning products
- Lottery tickets
- Meat
- Non alcoholic beverages, such as refreshments and water
- Personal hygiene and grooming products
- Snacks
- Toys (most supermarkets have toy sections)
- Video rentals (some supermarket chains)
- Western Union money orders and wire transfers
