Piggly Wiggly

Saunders patented the self-service store between 1917 and 1919, then lost the company in a Wall Street fight. In 1922 and 1923 he bought up Piggly Wiggly stock to counter short sellers, lifting it from $39 to $124 by March 1923, until the New York Stock Exchange declared a corner and gave short sellers extra time. He resigned in August 1923 after failing to repay a $2.5 million loan. His pink marble mansion became Memphis's first museum in 1930; his later ventures, Sole Owner of My Name and the key-operated Keedoozle, both failed.

What the plaque says

Piggly Wiggly Marker Front: With a brass band, a beauty contest, flowers for the ladies, and balloons for the children Clarence Saunders of Memphis opened the first Piggly Wiggly, America's first completely self-service grocery store, at 79 Jefferson Avenue (½ block west of here) on Sept. 6 1916. In conventional stores of that time, shoppers presented their orders to clerks who fetched goods, ground coffee beans, measured flour, and sugar, and then added the bills in pencil on the back of sacks. Marker Reverse: At Piggly Wiggly, customers entered through a turnstile, filled their own baskets as they walked through a maze of shelves containing hundreds of products, and had their bills figured by clerks with adding machines. Saunders received patents for many of his innovative designs. By 1921, his company, Piggly Wiggly Corporation, had franchised stores in 200 cities in 40 states, with combined annual sales of $60 million. In only five years, Saunders had revolutionized the U.S. grocery industry.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 0.5 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• Sun Studio — 0.9 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 0.9 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.0 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• First Tennessee Bank — steps away
• Forrest's Early Home — steps away
• Eugene Magevney — steps away
• Marion Scudder Griffin 1879-1957 — steps away