Shop the Pig!
Apr. 9th, 2025 07:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerGeorgia Travelog #7
Pooler, GA - Tuesday, 8 Apr 2025, 5:30pm
The first few times I saw depictions of a grocery store named Piggly Wiggly in films and writing I figured it was a joke. I mean, nobody would actually name a chain of groceries like that, right? Especially with the slogan Shop the Pig! It had to be a gag from some popular movie I never actually saw, like Caddyshack or something, that went viral— well, 1980s viral— and popped up in various places as a pop culture reference/joke.
Well, nope. As I'm sure people from almost half the country are raising their hands to tell me, Piggly Wiggly is really a grocery store. And there's one in Pooler, Georgia, where we're staying and visiting my sister this week.
A quick bit of searching shows that Piggly Wiggly is no small-town joke, either. Well, maybe it's in small towns but, as a quick bit of web searching shows, it's got almost 600 stores spread across 19 states. The store was an industry leader, too. It's considered the first self-service supermarket, innovating the modern concepts of checkout lanes and price stickers tagged on every individual item*— back in the 1910s!
Well, here I am 110 years later, and I've just Shopped the Pig. My sister and I swung by there for a few groceries after we finished Afoot in Savannah, Again! this afternoon. We tried Publix first, which is geographically more convenient to my hotel/her house and is a bigger, more modern store, but I was disappointed with the poor quality at Publix. Yes, they're big and look fancy, but all that selection at Publix is actually just 17 varieties of bland White people food. Piggly Wiggly wasn't much better for variety but its down-home vibe better matched the selection. And it was noticeably cheaper for similar items, including brand names. So, yes, I Shopped the Pig and Saved!
[*] Younger people might wonder how price stickers tagged on items was an innovation. The scanners we're all familiar with today that optically read UPC codes (those bar-coded numbers) on a packages only became standardized in the 1980s. That's when the technology capable of doing that, and manufacturers all printing UPC codes on packages, become commonplace. Prior to that merchants would put price stickers on every single item in a store's stock, and at checkout the cashier would quickly key in those prices at the register— which was basically just a big calculator that tallied up the total.
Pooler, GA - Tuesday, 8 Apr 2025, 5:30pm
The first few times I saw depictions of a grocery store named Piggly Wiggly in films and writing I figured it was a joke. I mean, nobody would actually name a chain of groceries like that, right? Especially with the slogan Shop the Pig! It had to be a gag from some popular movie I never actually saw, like Caddyshack or something, that went viral— well, 1980s viral— and popped up in various places as a pop culture reference/joke.
Well, nope. As I'm sure people from almost half the country are raising their hands to tell me, Piggly Wiggly is really a grocery store. And there's one in Pooler, Georgia, where we're staying and visiting my sister this week.
A quick bit of searching shows that Piggly Wiggly is no small-town joke, either. Well, maybe it's in small towns but, as a quick bit of web searching shows, it's got almost 600 stores spread across 19 states. The store was an industry leader, too. It's considered the first self-service supermarket, innovating the modern concepts of checkout lanes and price stickers tagged on every individual item*— back in the 1910s!
Well, here I am 110 years later, and I've just Shopped the Pig. My sister and I swung by there for a few groceries after we finished Afoot in Savannah, Again! this afternoon. We tried Publix first, which is geographically more convenient to my hotel/her house and is a bigger, more modern store, but I was disappointed with the poor quality at Publix. Yes, they're big and look fancy, but all that selection at Publix is actually just 17 varieties of bland White people food. Piggly Wiggly wasn't much better for variety but its down-home vibe better matched the selection. And it was noticeably cheaper for similar items, including brand names. So, yes, I Shopped the Pig and Saved![*] Younger people might wonder how price stickers tagged on items was an innovation. The scanners we're all familiar with today that optically read UPC codes (those bar-coded numbers) on a packages only became standardized in the 1980s. That's when the technology capable of doing that, and manufacturers all printing UPC codes on packages, become commonplace. Prior to that merchants would put price stickers on every single item in a store's stock, and at checkout the cashier would quickly key in those prices at the register— which was basically just a big calculator that tallied up the total.
