The American example

In 1949 Alan Sainsbury and fellow Sainsbury’s director Fred Salisbury visited the United States as part of a Ministry of Food drive to promote improvements in food retailing methods.

Alan Sainsbury recalled:

‘We went to study the display and sale of frozen foods in American stores but we both came back so thrilled and stimulated at the potentiality of self-service trading that that we became convinced that that the future lay with what we thought were large stores of 10,000 square feet of selling space’

At that time there were no supermarkets in Britain. Self-service stores in America had originated during the depression years, when warehouses were converted to sell packaged groceries with minimal customer service, and had since developed into a highly efficient method of retailing.

However, shopping patterns in America were very different to those in post-war Britain. In 1950, 59 per cent of American households owned a car compared to 12 per cent in Britain.  Home refrigerator ownership was also much more common in the United States than in Britain at this time.

American shoppers travelled by car to do their weekly shop at large edge-of-town supermarkets, while British customers shopped frequently for small amounts in high street stores. Some critics believed that self-service would never take off in Britain. Later Alan Sainsbury remarked ‘How lucky we were that they were wrong!’