Page 14 of The Anthropocene Reviewed

Penguins of Madagascar is an exceptionally silly movie. But how else can we confront the absurdities of the Anthropocene? I stand by my Provocative Opinion, and give the opening sequence of Penguins of Madagascar four and a half stars.

PIGGLY WIGGLY

IN 1920, according to census records, my great-grandfather Roy worked at a grocery store in a tiny town in western Tennessee. Like all U.S. grocery stores at the beginning of the twentieth century, this one was full-service: You walked in with a list of items you needed, and then the grocer—perhaps my great-grandfather—would gather those items. The grocer would weigh the flour or cornmeal or butter or tomatoes, and then wrap everything up for you. My great-grandfather’s store probably also allowed customers to purchase food on credit, a common practice at the time. The customer would then, usually, pay back their grocery bill over time.

That job was supposed to be my great-grandfather’s path out of poverty, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead, the store closed, thanks in part to the self-service grocery store revolution launched by Clarence Saunders, which reshaped the way Americans shopped and cooked and ate and lived. Saunders was a self-educated child of impoverished sharecroppers. Eventually, he found his way into the grocery business in Memphis, Tennessee, about a hundred miles southwest from my great-grandfather’s store. Saunders was thirty-five when he developed a concept for a grocery store that would have no counters, but instead a labyrinth of aisles that customers would walk themselves, choosing their own food and placing it in their own shopping baskets.

Prices at Saunders’s self-service grocery would be lower, because his stores would employ fewer clerks and also because he would not offer customers credit, instead expecting immediate payment. The prices would also be clear and transparent—for the first time, every item in a grocery store would be marked with a price so customers would no longer fear being shortchanged by unscrupulous grocers. Saunders called his store Piggly Wiggly.

Why? Nobody knows. When asked where the name came from, Saunders once answered that it arrived “from out of chaos and in direct contact with an individual’s mind,” which gives you a sense of the kind of guy he was. But usually, when Saunders was asked why anyone would call a grocery store Piggly Wiggly, he would answer, “So people will ask that very question.”

The first Piggly Wiggly opened in Memphis in 1916. It was so successful that the second Piggly Wiggly opened three weeks later. Two months after that, another opened. Saunders insisted on calling it “Piggly Wiggly the Third” to lend his stores the “royal dignity they are due.” He began attaching a catchphrase to his storefront signs: “Piggly Wiggly: All Around the World.” At the time, the stores were barely all around Memphis, but Saunders’s prophecies came true: Within a year, there were 353 Piggly Wigglies around the United States, and today, Saunders’s concept of self-service aisles really has spread all around the world.

In newspaper advertisements, Saunders wrote of his self-service concept in nearly messianic terms. “One day Memphis shall be proud of Piggly Wiggly,” one ad read. “And it shall be said by all men that the Piggly Wigglies shall multiply and replenish the Earth with more and cleaner things to eat.” Another time he wrote, “The mighty pulse of the throbbing today makes new things out of old and new things where was nothing before.” Basically, Saunders spoke of Piggly Wiggly as today’s Silicon Valley executives talk of their companies: We’re not just making money here. We are replenishing the earth.

Piggly Wiggly and the self-service grocery stores that followed did bring down prices, which meant there was more to eat. They also changed the kinds of foods that were readily available—to save costs and limit spoilage, Piggly Wiggly stocked less fresh produce than traditional grocery stores. Prepackaged, processed foods became more popular and less expensive, which altered American diets. Brand recognition also became extremely important, because food companies had to appeal directly to shoppers, which led to the growth of consumer-oriented food advertising on radio and in newspapers. National brands like Campbell Soup and OREO cookies exploded in popularity; by 1920, Campbell was the nation’s top soup brand and OREO the top cookie brand—which they still are today.

Self-service grocery stores also fueled the rise of many other processed food brands. Wonder Bread. MoonPies. Hostess CupCakes. Birds Eye frozen vegetables. Wheaties cereal. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. French’s mustard. Klondike bars. Velveeta cheese. All of these brands, and many more, appeared in the United States within a decade of the first Piggly Wiggly opening. Clarence Saunders understood the new intersections between mass media and brand awareness better than almost anyone at the time. In fact, during the early 1920s, Piggly Wiggly was the single largest newspaper advertiser in the United States.

Keeping prices low and employing fewer clerks also meant many people who worked at traditional grocery stores lost their jobs, including my great-grandfather. There’s nothing new about our fear that automation and increased efficiency will deprive humans of work. In one newspaper ad, Saunders imagined a woman torn between her longtime relationship with her friendly grocer and the low, low prices at Piggly Wiggly. The story concluded with Saunders appealing to a tradition even older than the full-service grocer. The woman in his ad mused, “Now away back many years, there had been a Dutch grandmother of mine who had been thrifty. The spirit of that old grandmother asserted itself just then within me and said, ‘Business is business and charity and alms are another.’” Whereupon our shopper saw the light and converted to Piggly Wiggly.

By 1922, there were more than a thousand Piggly Wiggly stores around the U.S., and shares in the company were listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Saunders was building a thirty-six-thousand-square-foot mansion in Memphis and had endowed the school now known as Rhodes College. But the good times would not last. After a few Piggly Wiggly stores in the Northeast failed, investors began shorting the stock—betting that its price would fall. Saunders responded by trying to buy up all the available shares of Piggly Wiggly using borrowed money, but the gambit failed spectacularly. Saunders lost control of Piggly Wiggly and went bankrupt.

His vitriol at Wall Street short sellers presaged contemporary corporate titans just as his reliance on big advertising and hyperefficiency did. Saunders was by many accounts a bully—verbally abusive, cruel, and profoundly convinced of his own genius. After losing control of the company, he wrote, “They have it all, everything I built, the greatest stores of their kind in the world, but they didn’t get the man that was father to the idea. They have the body of Piggly Wiggly but they didn’t get the soul.” Saunders quickly developed a new concept for a grocery store. This one would have aisles and self-service but also clerks in the meat department and the bakery. Essentially, he invented the supermarket model that would reign into the twenty-first century.

In less than a year, he was ready to open, but the new owners of Piggly Wiggly took him to court, arguing that the use of the Clarence Saunders name in relation to a new grocery store would violate Piggly Wiggly’s trademarks and patents. In response, Saunders defiantly named his new grocery store “Clarence Saunders: Sole Owner of My Name,” perhaps the only business name worse than Piggly Wiggly. And yet, it succeeded tremendously, and Saunders made a second fortune as Sole Owner stores spread throughout the South.

He went on to invest in a professional football team in Memphis, which he named the Clarence Saunders Sole Owner of My Name Tigers. Really. They played the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears in front of huge crowds in Memphis, and they were invited to join the NFL, but Saunders declined. He didn’t want to share revenue, or send his team to away games. He promised to build a stadium for the Tigers that would seat more than thirty thousand people. “The stadium,” he wrote, “will have skull and crossbones for my enemies who I have slain.”

But within a few years, the Sole Owner stores were crushed by the Depression, the football team was out of business, and Saunders was broke again. Meanwhile, the soulless body of Piggly Wiggly was faring quite well without Saunders—by the supermarket chain’s height in 1932, there were over twenty-five hundred Piggly Wigglies in the United States. Even in 2021, there are over five hundred locations, mostly in the South, although like many grocery stores, they are struggling under pressure from the likes of Walmart and Dollar General, which can undercut traditional grocery stores on price partly by providing even less fresh food and fewer clerks than today’s Piggly Wiggly does.

These days, Piggly Wiggly ads tend to focus on tradition, and the human touch. One north Alabama Piggly Wiggly TV spot from 1999 included this line: “At Piggly Wiggly, it’s all about friends serving friends,” a call to the kind of human-to-human relationships that Saunders ridiculed in that Dutch grandmother ad. The mighty pulse of the throbbing today does make new things out of old—but it also makes old things out of new.

Today, food prices are lower relative to average wage than they’ve ever been in the United States, but our diets are often poor. The average American ingests more sugar and sodium than they should, largely because of processed, prepackaged foods. More than 60 percent of calories consumed by Americans come from so-called “highly processed foods,” like the OREO cookies and Milky Way bars that flourished at early Piggly Wigglies. Clarence Saunders didn’t make any of this happen, of course. Like the rest of us, he was being pulled by forces far larger than any individual. He merely understood what America was about to want—and gave it to us.

After Saunders’s second bankruptcy, he spent decades trying to launch another new retail concept. The Keedoozle was a totally automated store that looked like a massive bank of vending machines and involved purchasing food with almost no human-to-human interaction. But the machinery often broke down, and people found the shopping experience slow and clunky, and so the Keedoozle was never profitable. The self-checkout process Saunders envisioned would only become a reality many decades later.

As he aged, Saunders grew more vitriolic and unpredictable. He began to suffer from debilitating bouts of mental illness, and eventually entered a sanitarium that treated people with anxiety and depression.

The mansion Saunders built with his first fortune became the Pink Palace Museum, Memphis’s science and history museum. The estate he built with his second fortune became Lichterman Nature Center. In 1936, the journalist Ernie Pyle said, “If Saunders lives long enough, Memphis will become the most beautiful city in the world just with the things Saunders built and lost.”

But Saunders never made a third fortune. He died at the Wallace Sanitarium in 1953, at the age of seventy-two. One obituary opined, “Some men achieve lasting fame through success, others achieve it through failure.” Saunders was a relentless innovator who understood the power of branding and efficiency. He was also hateful and vindictive. He committed securities fraud. And he helped usher in an era of food that fills without nourishing.

But mostly, when I think of Piggly Wiggly, I think about how the big get bigger by eating the small. Piggly Wiggly swallowed up the small-town grocery stores only to be swallowed itself by the likes of Walmart, which will in turn be swallowed by the likes of Amazon. James Joyce called Ireland the “sow that eats her farrow,” but Ireland has nothing on American capitalism.

I give Piggly Wiggly two and a half stars.

THE NATHAN’S FAMOUS HOT DOG EATING CONTEST

AT THE CORNER OF SURF and Stillwell Avenues in Brooklyn’s Coney Island, there is a restaurant called Nathan’s Famous, which started out in 1916 under the ownership of Polish immigrants Nathan and Ida Handwerker. The restaurant serves a variety of food—from fried clams to veggie burgers—but Nathan’s began as a hot dog place, and remains one at its core.

A Nathan’s hot dog is not the best food you will ever eat, or even the best hot dog you will ever eat. But there’s something special about the experience of eating one amid the clamor of Coney Island. And the hot dogs have a pedigree—they’ve been eaten by King George VI and Jacqueline Kennedy. Stalin supposedly ate one at the Yalta Conference in 1945.

Coney Island used to be the huckster capital of the world, where fast-talking barkers wearing straw hats would sell you on this carnival attraction or that one. Now, like all places that survive on nostalgia, it is mostly a memory of itself. The beaches are still packed in summertime. You can still ride the carousel, and there is still a line at Nathan’s Famous. But a big part of visiting Coney Island today is imagining how it must have once felt.

Except for one day a year, when Coney Island becomes its old self, for better and for worse. Every July 4, tens of thousands of people flood the streets to witness a spectacular exercise in metaphorical resonance known as the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. It says so much about contemporary American life that our Independence Day celebrations include 1. fireworks displays, which are essentially imitation battles complete with rockets and bombs, and 2. a contest in which people from around the world attempt to discover how many hot dogs and buns can be ingested by a human within ten minutes. To quote the legendary comedian Yakov Smirnoff: What a country.

Like the nation it aims to celebrate, the hot dog eating contest has always been a strange amalgamation of history and imagination. The contest’s originator was probably a guy named Mortimer Matz, whom the journalist Tom Robbins described as “part P. T. Barnum, part political scalawag.” Matz made much of his money as a public relations rep for politicians in crisis—a resource never in short supply in New York—but he also did PR for Nathan’s Famous along with his colleague Max Rosey. Matz claimed that the hot dog eating contest could trace its history back to July 4, 1916, when four immigrants staged a hot dog eating contest to determine which of them loved America the most. But he would later acknowledge, “In Coney Island pitchman style, we made it up.”